Interestingly, however, while one in 10 firms admit to suffering IP theft on an offshore project, in two out of three cases the source of the problem was a member of the onshore team.
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The Offshore 2005 research also warns against unrealistic cost saving expectations. When the successful and failed offshore projects were taken into account the average saving was found to be less than 10 per cent, although when the just the successful projects are taken into account the average saving is around 19 per cent.
Assuming the credibility of the source, I wonder what the savings would be if both the failures and the thefts were taken into account. Less than 10% is already a thin pie to slice; accounting for the loss of intellectual property might well bring "savings" to 0 or less...
And they wonder why this happens, when in every single one of these posts the word "quality" never appears by those advocating outsourcing.
My theory on IT outsourcing has always been that it will decline as soon as the crappy results come in. If we just let the free market process take its course, all will be worked out. As it should be.
The study polled companies in "US, UK, Canada and Europe" about offshoring. I'd be interested in knowing whether European projects offshored to the US were more or less successful than vise versa.
If you are having specific things done by the right people the comparative cost for some coding, web services for example, can be as low as 6% of domestic costs.
Software projects have high failure rates. Even the ones that aren't offshored.
the executives read this as - "2 of 3 succeed", so they just keeping sending it all over.
Most projects fail due to poor management, not the quality of work being done by line-level developers and testers.