Wednesday, December 22, 2004

From Outsourcing to Homesourcing

We have had enough of outsourcing, haven't we? Now comes homesourcing. This is catching on the US. What companies are discovering is instead of getting jobs done by Indians, Chinese or whoever, get it done by Americans themselves. But they will work from their homes and not offices.

Which means the person who is going to help you out with your credit card problems or computer malfunctioning may well be in his or her night dress on the bed!

This trend has been reported in a
press release issued by IDC which is a global market intelligence and advisory firm in IT and telecom industries.

Some consolation for Americans who are worried that jobs are going out of the US. Not just the loss of jobs. Outsourcing was at one point some sort of a joke in the US and the UK, since many felt people in Bangalore or Chennai or Mumbai are just not familiar with the US or the UK to help out -- like when British Railways outsourced part of its work to Bangalore. Apparently, following widespread complaints, Dell stopped sending US technical support calls for two of its corporate computer lines to a Bangalore call centre last year.

Proponents of homeshoring or homesourcing say it is in tune with giving more flexibility to workers in the way they do their jobs. They say productivity goes up.

But, I think as long as outsourcing to Bangalore or anywhere makes better economic sense to comapnies, it will stay.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I appreciate your comments. Thank you.
If your email ID is enabled in the Blogger profile, I'll reply to your comments via email because you won't have to come back here or look through email notifications to read my reply.
I might copy-paste the replies here if I feel they might be of interest to others as well.
For everyone else, I'll reply here.