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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: [gislist] Outsourcing GIS |
| Date: |
12/23/2003 09:10:01 AM |
| From: |
Anthony Quartararo |
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Jay,
This is akin to chicken little crying about the sky falling. Most, if not
all of medical claims processing is now done outside the US. That's right,
your detailed medical history, Rx histories, diagnoses, etc. while perhaps
not specifically tagged to you by name, are entered by legions of data entry
operators in far away places. You entrust your insurance provider
implicitly to handle this information confidentially, but should you ?
Credit card data, one of the biggest sources of personal ID theft, are
housed in some of the most secure facilities in the world, yet hardly a
month goes by without some news report of some smart hacker grabbing
thousands of personal account records and going on spending sprees.
Certification ? You are kidding right ? A PhD from MIT is not the same as a
PhD from the University of Phoenix, follow the analogy....
When [never again] US companies and Government organizations are willing to
PAY a reasonable fee for "buy-America" services then perhaps [never again]
GIS companies will have production facilities back on US soil [never again].
Who, aside from ESRI, SAIC, etc. wants to bid on Government jobs where you
negotiate your PROFIT up from zero, and consider yourself lucky if you can
break into double-digits? Sure, padding G&A is one way around this, but
have you ever been audited by a federal contracts officer? Proctologists
come to mind...
Customers, in every sense of the word, need to ensure they have adequate
contracts stipulating "who to put the death" in the relatively rare
situations you illustrate. As if Americans or Certified GIS professionals
are going to make less "human" errors than a GIS technician in Jakarta when
entering parcel information. If you spell out the job clearly enough at the
operator level, you remove as much variation in the production process as
possible, thereby the most common errors are easily addressed with
retraining, additional process improvements, automation techniques, or
replacing your operator.
Anthony
-----Original Message-----
From: gislist-bounces@lists.geocomm.com
[mailto:gislist-bounces@lists.geocomm.com] On Behalf Of Buckjl@aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2003 9:44 AM
To: gislist@lists.thinkburst.com
Subject: [gislist] Outsourcing GIS
In his thought-provoking book "To Engineer is Human" Henry Petroski cites
the Code of Hammurabi from ancient Babylon: "If a builder build a house for
a man and do not make its construction firm, and the house which he has
built collapse and cause the death of the owner of the house, that builder
shall be put to death. If it cause the death of the son of the owner of the
house, they shall put to death the son of the builder. If it cause the death
of a slave of the owner of the house, he shall give to the owner of the
house a slave of equal value."
GIS ranges from popular illustration thru computer science and data
management to hard civil engineering. Whom shall we "put to death" over
damages from an egregious error in a GIS record created around the world by
an outsourced technician? Whom shall we hold accountable when a homeowner
cannot get clear title to his property because a technician around the world
incorrectly encodes the property description? Whom shall we hold accountable
when a GPS-guided bomb falls on a latitude and longitude that mistakenly
targets a hospital? It's one thing to outsource a $3 padlock or the creation
of entertainment software (or hardware). But outsourcing the creation and
maintenance of the legal and technical description of civil engineering data
is another. Which leads into that other fun topic of certification of GIS
professionals, doesn't it?
____________________
Jay L. Buckley
JLB Associates, Ltd.
11516 Dahlia Terrace
Potomac, MD 20854
301-987-7269
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