Supply Excellence — Telecommuting leads to Outsourcing?

Telecommuting leads to Outsourcing?

September 12th, 2008 · by Justin Fogarty · No Comments · LCCS and trade, best practices, outsourcing

Earlier this week, Valleywag (a popular Silicon Valley blog that covers the tech-celebrity world like some sort of cross between Techcrunch and TMZ) had a post on outsourcing of IT jobs. They link to a couple of great articles; a WSJ piece on the trends in reverse-outsourcing and a CIO case study of four horrific outsourcing-gone-bad stories. Both were enlightening and well worth reading, particularly if you’re after assurances that all white collar jobs will not someday move to a low-cost country.

Where Valleywag’s “Tim the IT Guy” goes wrong is in trying to draw a connection between telecommuting and the likelihood an IT job will be outsourced. Sure I suppose you could say that if you can do a job from home, someone else could theoretically do that job from 6,000 miles away. But if an attendance log tallied up by a hall monitor with a clipboard is the key factor in a company’s staffing location decisions, that company has some seriously flawed logic and financial models. Regulations, public perception, currency exchange rates and of course…OUTPUT…all must factor into a TCO model if a company wants to make rational, informed, strategic decisions.

As with any job, IT professionals need to provide value. That value of course is measured against competing/alternative sources of the same service from other possible avenues, from 3rd parties to shifting responsibilities to company offices abroad. But if you’re in IT (or any other position for that matter) and think putting in face time at the office is the key to job security, you could be in for a rude awakening one day.

Just for the record, I wrote this post from home.

Justin Fogarty is Managing Editor of Supply Excellence. For any questions or feedback on the blog or its contributors, Justin can be reached at jfogarty[at]ariba.com.

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