Should Western graduates plan to work offshore?

Should Western graduates plan to work offshore? Australian tech graduates are being encouraged to take up internships in India. Should we?

Extract from the article...

"Now the NSW government has given its backing to a program to send young workers to the sub-continent to gain experience and improve their employability.
Five information and communication technology (ICT) students and recent graduates from the University of NSW and Sydney University will spend eight weeks living and working on campus at Infosys, India's largest technology services vendor, from January next year.
Headquartered in Bangalore, and listed in the US, Infosys is an IT outsourcing and consultancy vendor employing 153,000 people worldwide, including 2400 in Australia."

 (see the article on smh.com.au)

Complications of attempting to outsource services

The situation at Capita UK illustrates the potential for services outsourcing initiatives to run up against end-customer objections. In this case Capita IT Services offshore outsourcing plan contravened Capita UK's service level agreements with its end-customers.
But was the problem really as straight forward as it appears?

Links:

C. Hall, Capita IT staff strike over Indian offshoring plans, 2012.

Capita: we have a number of business outsourcing opportunities available to you. (web page 2/10/2012).

Capita India is Capita (web page 2/10/2012)

Capita UK offshoring plan killed by customer backlash - insiders

fundit.ie crowdsources funding for projects

Fundit.ie crowdsources funding for projects ranging over: art, craft, design, events, fashion, film and television, food, games, media and publishing, music, performance, science and technology...

Paraphrased from Fundit.ie's About page.

"Fundit.ie is based at 44 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Ireland. It is an all-island (island of Ireland) crowdfunding website for creative projects, giving anyone the power to help good ideas happen. It is designed to support greater individual giving to the creative sector; an area that up until now has been under-utilised. The approach serves to strengthen the bond between a creator and their audience which offers the potential for wider-ranging, long-term relationships."

Loughborough Centre for Global Sourcing and Services (CGSS)

The Loughborough Centre for Global Sourcing and Services (CGSS) undertakes independent research on the trends and practices in global sourcing of IT and business services. Its goal is to improve sourcing practices through on-going engagement with managers and policy makers. In particular, the centre is interested in understanding how individuals, teams, organisations and other stakeholders cope with: the centralisation of business and IT service functions through shared service units; the disaggregation of business and IT service functions through captive centres and third party vendors; the back-sourcing of previously outsourced business and IT service functions; and the emergence of new sourcing models such as cloud services.

For information about the centre see http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/research/centres/cgss/index.html

Working in Bangalore; an inside view of outsourcing

This series of films attempt to peel back the cover of what happens on the other end of the phone in Bangalore's software outsourcing industry.

"You're in a space warp where you don't know you're in Bangalore."

Is what we see depicted in these snapshots of work life in Bangalore really much different from what happens in our own work places? Is the software development industry marked by diversity of approach or is its culture, professional norms and values much more homogeneous than expected?

The films are available to purchase from www.der.org

Outsourcing reversal at GM

From Slashdot... "GM's new CIO Randy Mott plans to bring nearly all IT work in-house as one piece of a sweeping IT overhaul. It's a high-risk strategy that's similar to what Mott drove at Hewlett-Packard. Today, about 90% of GM's IT services, from running data centers to writing applications, are provided by outsourcing companies such as HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro, and only 10% are done by GM employees. Mott plans to flip those percentages in about three years--to 90% GM staff, 10% outsourcers. This will require a hiring binge. Mott's larger IT transformation plan doesn't emphasize budget cuts but centers on delivering more value from IT, much faster--at a time when the world's No. 2 automaker (Toyota is now No. 1) is still climbing out of bankruptcy protection and a $50 billion government bailout." For more see Information Week (July 09, 2012)

Commentary on managing distributed teams

From the HBR blogs...

"Managers frequently ask for best practices for managing their global teams, and recently we've noticed some common themes. Here are the three questions that keep coming up again and again, and what the research tells us about how to address them..."
"...managers of virtual teams should have dual, complementary objectives: structure and socialize. First they must shift their teams' work practices away from the dynamic adjustment outlined above towards more structured coordination. Clear team-level work processes, output requirements, and group norms reduce the complexity of virtual team coordination from coordinating efforts across multiple sites to aligning one's efforts with a single, consistent set of expectations. Second, as the speed of today's economy means no team — collocated or distributed — can eliminate all such dynamic adjustment, virtual team managers also work to support and facilitate dynamic adjustment when it's required by promoting and encouraging informal interaction."

Reference: Managing a Virtual Team, by Mark Mortensen and Michael O’Leary (link), published: 9:52 AM Monday April 16, 2012