Subject Matter

Outsourcing & Offshoring

Offshoring

Challenge or opportunity?

There’s no going back – IT services have become a global industry

Chaucer Consulting’s Roger Baker took part in a 9-month investigation into the real impacts of offshore outsourcing on IT professionals in the UK. The BCS has recently published their findings in the report “Offshoring – A Challenge or Opportunity for British IT Professionals?”

You might find the results surprising. Press reports often highlight difficulties caused by specific offshore activities and perhaps exaggerate the general level of dissatisfaction. But the continued growth of the offshore market and steady growth of the UK economy paint a different picture.

The investigation concluded that while the impacts on individuals are personally severe, the overall impact on industry redundancies is lower than press reports would have you believe.

The real challenge is to build a successful offshoring strategy for Britain’s IT industry:

  • Promoting the competitive strengths of Britain’s IT profession by objectively and critically reviewing our performance in comparison with the best in the world. The working party carried out an initial SWOT analysis for the UK IT profession.
  • Enabling the UK economy to benefit from offshoring. The capability to source globally is a growing competitive differentiator for companies and countries. Most UK companies face international competition and it would be unreasonable to expect them to limit their sourcing options.
  • Ensuring good career development and training, to face the challenge where traditional IT skills such as software development have become globally ubiquitous. A narrow focus on technical skills and their application will not help tomorrow’s professionals. We found that IT staff can underestimate their business knowledge and expertise.
  • Protecting IT professionals displaced by offshoring, by helping them prepare to re-enter the job market retrained, reinvigorated and remotivated, despite the traumas involved in being displaced.

The report also warns others not to live in a fool’s paradise: it could happen to you. So, how do you get ready for it?

The report identifies a range of self-help techniques that are vital for IT professionals to maximise employment and career prospects. Many are obvious, but they are easy to neglect in the preoccupations of day-to-day corporate life – until it’s too late.

The report criticises government for being less than helpful, and praises the recent ‘socially responsible’ outsourcing deals negotiated by unions with employers. Such deals, that help employees redeploy, are funded by around 4% of the first year’s savings from offshoring. Employers have seen this as a small price to pay to be considered socially responsible by the general public and customers.

The report is free and can be obtained from: http://www.bcs.org.uk or from Chaucer Consulting.