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On surfing the
offshoring wave The Offshore Nation
What makes this book stand apart from rest of the run-of-the-press stuff is that one it has been written by "insiders"—by those who have actually benefited from IT outsourcing. The authors are at the helm of affairs of neoIT, a leading management consultancy that focuses on offshore and global sourcing. Secondly, perhaps this is the first book that so painstakingly delves into the benefits of outsourcing by way of case studies, flow charts and comparison sheets. Thirdly, the book doesn’t blatantly sell India as the only outsourcing hub that the world is looking at. The book’s approach is pragmatic and while listing out the advantages that India has, it is quick to point out the USPs of the other nations in the race—Singapore, Vietnam, Caribbean, Brazil, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Hungary, Poland, Ireland—just to name a few. It won’t be out of place to call this a techno-management category book. Since the concept of outsourcing is relatively new on the publisher’s time-scale, not many very good books have been written on the subject and those written in such organised style are few and far between. The book justifies offshoring shredding the myths that surround services globalisation. Divided into six parts, the book analyses offshore maturity model, total cost of offshoring and talks about the governance structure in managing offshoring presence. Another high point of the book is the grey-coloured boxish break quotes—quotable comments on outsourcing made by high-flying IT executives and interesting facts—that rather lavishly intersperse the text. The authors have detailed out various business models like joint ventures, captives, third-party dedicated centres or BOT (build, operate, transfer) representations while discussing the benefits that each global ownership model provides. While making out a strong case for captive centres, the authors highlight that models should be applied after thoroughly evaluating the strengths, opportunities, weakness and threats of business generation from a particular country. They note that before offshoring any particular work, it is in the interest of the corporate to study exogenous factors like government support, educational system, infrastructure and geopolitical environment, catalyst factors like physical and time zone displacement, cultural compatibility, labour pool and language proficiency and business environment factors like cost advantage, security, IP protection and supportive people issues. As per the data provided in the book, India’s IT services exports in 2003 were the highest raking in $ 9.5 billion followed by Canada at $ 8 billion. Other few quick facts, and interesting ones at that, are listed in appendix columns viz. a checklist on ITOs and BPOs operating from various countries, globalisation readiness index, globalisation resources and most importantly, the offshore 100, which lists out the best performing IT services firms, top 10 offshore call centre firms and top rookies in global outsourcing. The only drawback that the book faces is that it merely touches the issue of data privacy. Just grazes past it, that’s all. More details on the issue could have gone down well with the readers, especially in this "globally hot" scenario of sting operations. Those who agree with the
outsourcing concept must read the book for it would just strengthen
their case. Those who disagree should also read it—for they’ll know
what they are missing from their business model and bank account. |
Outsourcing seldom fails
to make news. Earlier, it was all about the brouhaha that developed
countries made about job losses and now, it is all about confidential
customer data being compromised, allegedly. Critics debate on social
losses versus economic gains while business houses swear by the net
gains that accrue through offshoring.