Oh No! My Employer Has Outsourced This Column To India

It's one of the reasons I don't believe this current fear of outsourcing is going to leave us all performing menial jobs while raising the standard of living in China and India.

That's not to say this trend isn't going to force some very real changes in our job market. I just don't believe it will render us rudderless and our children living in a dust bowl.

In the 1970s the energy crisis had many in this country believing that the sheiks of the Middle East where going to be flush with so much cash they would literally buy up most of the United States and own our economy. The doomsayers were predicting OPEC would someday call the shots and we would be beholden to their every whim. It never happened.

That was followed in the late 1970s by a fear the Japanese economic model was going to bury us. Japan invented just-in-time manufacturing and quality controls that would rip out the very soul of U.S. economic vitality. Again, disaster failed to materialize.

Then, the early 1980s came and Korea was going to do Japan and us in. What happened to that?

To be sure, throughout the past 35 years there has been an enormous shifting of jobs once performed here to overseas locations. The vast majority of high-tech equipment is already built overseas by contract manufacturers located in Taiwan, Singapore and elsewhere. The difference, of course, is this time it's not just happening to a particular industry but because of the Internet it is happening everywhere.

Fact is, any job that is not customer-facing and can be digitized has the potential to be outsourced.

We are going to see more jobs outsourced, whether to India, China or some lower-cost area outside of Silicon Valley. For this industry,and more importantly for solution providers,there certainly will be changes resulting from all this. The need to outsource some application development overseas to stay competitive will be real but there may also be an opportunity to provide that as a managed service. In either case, the upfront consulting work and management of the development still will need to be done close to the customer.

Let's face it, nobody, including you, ever says they want to pay the highest possible price for a good or service. In the end if outsourcing offers the opportunity to build a product somewhere else in a manner that drives the price down and keeps the customer happy, then it is going to happen.

There is only one thing that could change our standard of living for the worse and that's if we do not continually improve our educational system and the level of higher learning our children and workers obtain. If that goes sour then all bets are off.

Contact Robert Faletra at: [email protected]