Will the U.S. Recession Mean the End of Offshore Outsourcing?

CIO — I recall sitting on a panel at an outsourcing conference in New York City back in 2004 when the major spike in offshore outsourcing kicked into gear. There were protesters outside, demonstrating their frustration about U.S. jobs "moving offshore". In response, an attorney declared, "outsourcing provides a great opportunity for the U.S.—we can "offload low-value jobs and focus on higher-value, more innovative work". I recall thinking to myself, even then, that that argument didn't quite add up.

While it sounds like a nirvana, the reality is we're competing globally for labor, for making cheaper, better cars, for delivering good quality IT services, for delivering quality finance, HR and supply chain support. If the U.S. is to truly deliver "higher-value", the government needs to invest in education programs that develop this talent. The reality is that the rest of the world caught up. People in Chennai, Manila, Bucharest, Guatemala City, Guangzhou, etc. are being trained to compete with American, British, French and German workers, and the Internet and new technology have been a huge enabler to make this happen. A good friend who works for one of the leading India-based BPOs recently suggested, "We should bring over the training leaders from the top Indian outsourcers and have them work with U.S. businesses to get their act together".

What continues to irk me, is that industry has become so focused on making its quarterly numbers that it has taken its eye off the long-term picture. We saw this financial meltdown coming—and did nothing (wasn't the Asian crisis of the '90s warning enough?). We are seeing further deterioration of the environment—and still do little. We saw the U.S. automotive industry grind down to its current predicament—and have done nothing. And we are seeing the IT and business process outsourcing industry rapidly develop across the globe—and have blissfully ignored it to meet these cost-containment targets.

And how to we respond? Bailouts. We're now talking about bailing out the failing automotive industry. How did it come to this? Years of greed, a deterioration of our work-ethics, and developing nations eager to get a taste of what we have. It's as if we had a major cardiac arrest and are now hoping we can recover fully from open-heart surgery.

And this time when we do recover (and we will), we simply have to make sure this never happens again. Some will argue this is all about natural economics of globalization and a free market—and they are probably right. However, this time we have truly reached an inflection point.

How the outsourcing landscape will change in this new economy

What is clear, is that shipping jobs offshore isn't necessary very healthy for the rising U.S. unemployment rate.

What's more, many offshore service providers are now focused on taking on more high-value work activities for their clients, in addition to routine transaction work. For example, once you have your general ledger run from a service provider in, say Chennai, what is now stopping that provider taking on higher-value accounting services, such as budgeting/forecasting and business intelligence? That provider basically owns and understands much of the revenue cycle of that client, hence the natural next step is to move up the process value chain.

And if your current provider won't move up the value-chain, there is a proliferation of KPO providers willing and ready to take on higher-value offshore work. Moreover, while a firm may have been enjoying good quality COBOL programming from Brazil, what's stopping that provider offering systems architecture work for their client, which is among the costliest onshore IT services?

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