Offshoring is kind of over, says Wipro, as financials surge thanks to offshoring Wipro has both celebrated customers’ use of offshoring for its positive impact on its finances and suggested the concept may have been made obsolete by the pandemic-induced surge in working from home. The Indian services giant yesterday reported its fastest growth in nine years, with Q3 revenue [PDF] of $2.1bn, of which $2. …
@claimed
Fair comment, provided you can find out what the outsource is doing (or, more critically for security) what they're not doing. This can be very hard. These days the outsource usually defines the contract (weird but true) and you'll find it's typically vague on detail, includes absolution clauses, and specifies a bare minimum of reporting (if any at all).
If you keep your tech in house to do of course lose some benefits (e.g. dynamic scaling), but at least you can have direct tabs on the state of play provided you make the effort.
In my experience, many businesses do indeed outsource under the impression that they are handing over the responsibility. They find out they were wrong when the outsource screws up publicly. But these are typically the businesses that wouldn't make the effort to find out the state of play even while all was in house.
Nobody and nothing can help the negligent.
In order to "scale" a workforce, the job has to be well defined. Thats how these teams operate, by a playbook, if its not in bullet points with a triple signed request, it ain't happening.
Want a problem solver? Thats not scalable.
Am I ok with jobs which can be done by a playbook going overseas? Yes, as they'll be automated shortly anyway, so better that some human gets paid than no human.
I'd go so far as to say your in-house staff have a greater in-depth knowledge and are usually better at deploying new projects and resolving problems.
Rarely does an outsourcing outfit give a crap about this. You have delivery people that do not understand the environment they are delivering into. In some cases, architects that do not understand fully the solution they are designing for, let alone how its supposed to fit into the environment. In some cases, solutioners who come up with weird numbers and ideas on how long it would take to put in (some of you will know who I am on about here). And the front-line grunts? They follow a script regardless of whether it works or not. That's assuming they stay around long enough.
Offshoring takes jobs away from people here. You're alright with that? It's a money saving exercise.
I've certainly never seen it done for quality reasons. And I have set up departments in India. I've tried to get change in.. Stop the churn. But it's warm bums on seats, and IBM and Wipro were the most stubborn companies I worked transition for.
When _YOU_ were there did you SHOW talent? I've known a few that have talent that were once in one of these "IT temp. services" and all of them hated it after about 2 years. One of them in particular left one of these "services" and took a job at McDonald's, he said if both jobs paid the same he'd much, MUCH rather work at McDonald's.
While I know all these people under different circumstances, it's hard for me to picture any of them working for one of these companies who's fashion is similar to ants marching, thus I'm not sure if any of them would exhibit any type of talent due solely to how the companies are ran. While I've never worked for one of these companies, one thing is for sure from my relations with those who have, these companies are all about paint by numbers.
Me, personally, when I was there? Yeah, I showed talent. How, you ask? By surviving longer than Wipro did servicing the company in question, by knowing my area of expertise and repeatedly demonstrating it to the customer.
Just because I may end up working for a shit company (through no fault of my own I might add) doesn't mean I automatically sink to their level...
“That's why, in my view, India will continue to have a unique position, in terms of concentration of technology expertise and talent but also in terms of quality of the expertise,”
Errr - really? Like @lansalot, as a former employee I can tell you that expertise was very hard to find out in the wider Wipro ecosystem. If anything, it was a case of companies being used as training grounds!
My experience of offshoring to an in-house business unit based in India was that the Indian employees used the company I worked for as a training opportunity to get more experience/polish their CV, then used that additional experience to get a better paid position elsewhere in the local technology hub/city. It led to continuous employee turnover/churn, and the need to 'on-board' inexperienced employees all the time. Basically, we were training people to get better paid positions elsewhere, which was not a viable business proposition.
Of course, the company I worked for did not want to do the obvious and improve the pay and conditions for the Indian workers, as that would have made offshoring look bad. So we had to put up with the situation. I left not long after, so I don't know how things have ultimately played out. Being unable to guarantee that technical staff would be around for the duration of project roll-outs, let alone the full term of multi-year customer contracts was a big drag on efficiency - Fred isn't worth us any more: meet Joe, who comes to us straight from university/technical college. Please help him come up to speed. Rinse and repeat at the next project meeting. Continuity 'R' us, it wasn't.
My other experience of the large Indian outsourcers is that their project teams seem to be a bubbling maelstrom of people, or to put a positive spin on it - an extremely dynamic environment. Working out whether it cost-effective was above my pay-grade.
It can be, if the project is well defined and the relationship well managed, however in most cases that doesn't seem to be the norm. Savings are usually short-term, and by the time problems come to light the exec originally responsible has taken their bonus and left for pastures new.
It is a bean counting exercise
Having been in India and managed the transition for both IBM and Wipro, I have experience trying to stop the churn, I tried to run training giving genuine expertise.
Meanwhile, my UK colleagues with families were getting binned off.
I failed. Because it was me vs an entire company culture. Wipro were if anything worse than IBM, as IBM then had the weight of actually having happy clients.
These days? I'm out that game, it was soul destroying just seeing people being made redundant over and over and the idea I was helping it happen.
Wipro were not interested in expertise. They were interested in cheap bums on seats to follow a script.
If you seriously think offshoring is about anything but the financial bottom line, think on....
.. And I'd add, while I didn't stick around, I strongly suspect the cost benefit is extremely short term.
That was my overriding thought about IBM's non-replacement of a dedicated Problem Management team. They rolled it into the Service Desk.
Anyone well versed in ITIL may well bristle at that... But I just saw it as foolish, particularly when the Major Incident Management team were let go without a knowledge transfer (I was on garden leave at this point).
There is something to be said for experience, knowhow and specialisation. I cannot, in any world that values efficency (and IBM's world isn't that), see how this wouldn't cost more in the long run.
That is exactly the point and the paragraph:
"Company president and CFO Jatin Dalal said the mix of work Wipro performed in pleasingly low-cost offshore locations, as opposed to in customers’ home nations, “has improved by approximately 6 percentage over the course of last four quarters.”
Sums it all up. Everything to do with companies like this (and the big conglomerates in the US/EU) is about reducing absolute costs in the short term. There is no interest in retaining staff or quality. Everything is about the lowest possible cost to increase shareholder value.
The fact that the services or solutions that are delivered are atrocious is a minor inconvenience that is quietly buried. We delivered xyz almost on time, really cheaply and some of it works.
The industry really has no place now for people who understand, care and take pride, not only in their own work but as part of a team. Basically it is all about £££.
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