Stop Offshoring
Sunday, June 01, 2008
I saw an interesting quote in an article on IT consulting firms like Gartner that has to do with offshoring. The quote is:
Two such themes that are popular with such consultants right now are offshoring/outsourcing and getting rid of legacy applications to gain agility, whatever that is.
...
Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.
Yeah, right.
The idea that offshoring is a "good thing" just because it saves money is baloney. More often than not, offshoring isn't worth the cost savings, and companies who decide to offshore IT jobs are clueless as to how to really solve their problems.
