outsourcing IT offshore

Despite the supercharged politics surrounding
the issue, outsourcing IT offshore
has become a fact of life, and it’s
growing quickly.Why? Because despite
the difficulties, offshoring can provide huge benefits
in terms of productivity, prices, profits and
wages—an irresistible combination in a highly
competitive world. A natural evolution of how the
global marketplace operates today, offshoring is on
the way to becoming a mainstream business. And
the future for outsourcing looks even brighter.
Still, offshore outsourcing brings with it a wide
variation in costs from country to country, as well as
significant risks—geopolitical, economic, legal, cultural,
and IT infrastructure and competency—and
companies making decisions about where to outsource
must take these into account. The goal of this
whiteboard is to provide a thorough country-bycountry
analysis of the current outsourcing market,
and to point out where to find the best opportunities
for a variety of services. The result is the Global
Outsourcing Index,which rates each country on the
basis of a combination of relative cost, risk, and market
opportunity. And because the world is changing
so fast, the whiteboard also looks at where offshoring
opportunities can be found in the future.
The trend toward offshore outsourcing is a lot
more complex than simply seeking skills and
resources in the lowest-cost locations. The driving
forces in the IT outsourcing market are quality
and speed to market, not just cost of services.
A new wave of outsourcing is allowing companies
to acquire reliable IT quickly, in order to deploy
specialized services, and ramp down easily when
these services are no longer needed.
At the same time, offshoring is pushing the
world beyond the information economy and
toward a global knowledge-based economy. Technology
enables knowledge to be shared quickly
throughout the developed and developing world,
allowing a variety
of regional specializations
to arise.
These trends are
conspiring to bring
further changes to
the global outsourcing
market in the next decade or so. First of all,
consumer demand and spending power in the
emerging economies is growing more quickly
than expected. And as they grow in strength and
stability, the risks of outsourcing can be spread
further as companies have a wider variety of geographic
locations to choose from.
In the future,many companies will not outsource
to a particular country at all. Instead, they
will turn to large multinational corporations with
access to a variety of resources and expertise across
the globe and the ability to spread risk. As these
one-stop shops grow in size and skills, they will
gain a significant competitive advantage over even
the strongest individual outsourcing markets.