Were you one of the ten percent?
You might like these articles though:
(Vanity) Another Look at Outsourcing:
(*)McKinsey’s motives in this, however, may not be as pure as the wind-driven snow, or even the silt-ridden Ganges. According to an article from The Times of India, McKinsey is being paid to generate jobs in India: “The Karnataka government would like to see more jobs created in these areas and has mandated consultancy firm McKinsey to formulate a strategy to generate one million jobs by 2008.” QED.
(Vanity) A Falling Tide Grounds All Boats:
There are a number of reasons which have been given in the past for the desirability and the “inevitability” of offshoring. First, it was the wages:
But now it has changed; see the Jan. 30, 2006 Business Week on “The Future of Outsourcing” :
Up to now, the primary motivation of corporate bean-counters has been to take advantage of the huge wage gap between industrialized and developing nations. Big layoffs at home were usually the result.
But now, a more strategic view of global sourcing is starting to emerge. The new buzzword is "transformational outsourcing". Many companies are discovering that off shoring is really about growth - making better use of skilled US staff, and even creating new types of jobs in the US. The labor savings from global sourcing can still be substantial. But it's small compared to the enormous gains in efficiency, productivity, quality, and revenues that can be achieved by fully leveraging offshore talent.
NOW it's making sense. The shift from short-sighted, narrow-minded local-job protection, to true business use of global resources, stimulating innovative talents, partnering of complementary knowledge resources. Ubiquitous broadband communications makes this possible.
In other words, they are admitting the the cost savings weren’t “really” the reason?
Or from the February 17, 2006 Business week interview with the CEO of India’s Cognizant Technologies:
Outsourcing started as a way for companies to realize the benefits of lower costs. Later, they realized they could improve the quality of much of their work by taking advantage of excellent workforces. Now they are coming to understand that companies like Cognizant can help them assemble teams and projects much faster than they could in the U.S. That's the real value, time to market. It can take six months to assemble a team in the U.S. We can have a problem solved in six months.
Read that again. “Now they are coming to understand, …that’s the real value, time to market.” So were they lying before, about low costs, and they have to come up with a new rationale? Or have wages in the Third World suddenly risen to match those in the States, but the Americans are now just too slow?
So if the reasons for outsourcing cannot be consistently articulated, even by the CEO’s of the outsourcing firms themselves, what is going on here? I came across the following article, again from Business Week, Feb. 28, 2006:
While there are no numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests that scores, perhaps hundreds, of former GE and McKinsey executives and consultants play key roles as both suppliers of outsourced services and customers for them. ``Every time we have an outsourcing forum, it's like a GE and McKinsey alumni association meeting,'' says Sunil Mehta, vice-president of NASSCOM, India's software industry association.
In other words, there is a large element of the “old boy’s network” here. Read the Feb. 28 article, there’s a lot to it.