Most certainly, the past decade-or-so was marked by an explosive growth in the outsourcing and offshoring phenomenon. This should come as no surprise, since the offshorability of business functions, on the condition of their being recurrent or repeatable, is measured along a fourfold criteria checklist, viz.

 

 

(I) Internetability of the process,

(IC) high level of information content,

(T) tele-workability of human resources, and

(WD) discrepancy in HR wage structure between the parties involved.

 

If all these four of parameters are carefully plotted on a graph and the points are then joined by a line, the surface area of the resulting figure should indicate the overall offshorability of the business activity in question.

With the four parameters generally on the rise, offshoring should naturally be booming.

Why is it, then, that so many of our clients, both major organisations and SMEs, once the offshoring project is en route, seem to struggle endlessly to get things right?

 

Conventionally, offshore outsourcing is defined as the practice of hiring some external supplier organisation to perform a certain series of business functions in some country other than the one where the products and services are developed or manufactured. Plain offshoring, on the other hand, would then concern only those kind of activities where the business functions are completely performed in another country and by a foreign subsidiary.

 

As in any management area, the field of offshoring management is littered with acronyms: ITO stands for Information Technology Outsourcing, BPO for Business Process Outsourcing, SRDO for Software Research and Development Outsourcing and KPO for Knowledge Process Outsourcing.

 

 

 

Of whichever type, offshoring is not an easy process: 

 

(1) First and foremost, the offshoring operation tends to be severely criticised by a number of stakeholders, from the domestic workforce and trade union organisations (who see it as a threat to domestic job security) to the customer (who generally mistrusts the intrinsic value of the offshored custserv process), which often turns the whole thing into a bitter arena of dissent even from before day one.

(2) Next, once the offshoring is en route, one tends to quickly discover that managing an offshored operation, and ensuring efficiency of output, often is much more tricky than the promises of cost reduction are bright.

 

The first critique has everything to do with remnants of inherent protectionist emotions, expressed by a large number of society who remain to be afraid of the reality of a globalising economy in a globalising world. This kind of thinking is driven by a very powerful us vs them segregation and an extreme nationstate based definition of our limits of solidarity. Strikingly, this notion is so strong that it has penetrated in the very name of what we are talking about: off-shoring cannot be anything else than something done by the classic supreme Anglo-Saxon styled island economies, which possess a shore, limiting themselves from an outside world, and from where one can offshore someting to the other side. The word in itself is singularly one-sided: it tells you who the agent is, and who it is on whom is acted upon. Fruitlessly will one gaze for a point of view in which the two parties are jointly working for a common goal, which is a commonly manufactured product or a commonly processed service, for a commonly shared scope of common customers.

 

The answer here is with the development of a competence of community, where degrees of definitions of personal identity are gradually extended to and re-prioritised, in order to bring the personal identity of the self as belonging to the worldwide community of professionals to the number one position.

 

The second challenge lies with managing the offshored activity.

There are many sides to this issue, the two most embarrassing of which are intimately linked to each other:

Here, the answer is with a combination of measures taken to de-virtualise the team members as strongly as possible, management modes installed to enhance and materialise the virtual communication streams, and, most importantly, the development of a competence of deference, where deference for difference has overtaken difference in its importance, and where everyone is consistedly probing for the added value brought in by the reality of diversity.

 

 

 

With offshoring being the talk-of-the-town, one would expect there to be ample choice in interesting reading material on the subject. Sadly, this is not the case. For the Dunya clients, we tend to suggest the delightful, very useful and challenging Offshoring IT Services: A Framework for Managing Outsourced Projects (2006) by K Mohan Babu, who is not a mere theorist but is himself a member of the Consulting Practice with Infosys, one of the major IT outsourcing players on the global market.

 

And that the global market is a reality, out there to remain, can hardly be doubted. It is our job, for the Dunyas of the world, to make sure that this reality brings along a new set of hitherto unexplored qualities, equally shared and distrubuted among a global community of interculturally engaged human beings.

 

Insha’allah!                       (Francis Laleman)