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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: [gislist] Outsourcing GIS |
| Date: |
12/24/2003 05:35:01 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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>
> If IBM or some other large corporation has a contract problem while
> outsourcing to a different country, I am sure they have enough weight to
> protect themselves, but how does a small company in the mid-western U.S.
> with limited resources enforce a contract with a company in India or Viet
> Nam or other location? Also, how does a company with limited IT resources
> know that someone isn't coding back doors and other underhanded stuff into
> the software? How does a company know that its very important and
> propriety
> business methods isn't being sold by these software developers,
> and if they
> are, what recourse does the company have?
>
You don't know that with anyone that you hire to any certainty, regardless
of the country you are in. For example, Verisign holds itself out as a high
integrity company in the SSL certificate business (the only value they
have), yet they gullibly gave away Microsoft's SSL certificates to someone
that called up posing as a Microsoft guy.
The one thing I would suggest is that xenophobia is not an infallible path
to telling whether someone is trustworthy or not. The fact that people make
the mistake of trusting people who are near to them and distrusting people
who are far away is what keeps local scam artists in business and is one of
the factors that forces Indian firms to charge five times less. Because
people fear what is unfamiliar the new kid on the block has to work a lot
harder and provide better value to win business.
You can see this pattern repeated all the time. For example, five years ago
people were afraid to buy things over Internet. Now, hardly anyone buys an
airline ticket *except* through an online site.
Another example: years ago US companies were afraid to hire foreigners for
just the xenophobic reasons you cite. However, once it became clear that
the US educational system no longer taught mathematics at a sophisticated
enough level there was no choice but to hire Indians, Russians, Chinese,
Koreans, Pakistanis and the like for elite engineering positions and that
was the end of xenophobia.
A third example: I used to be a general manager at Intel during the
transition from 386 to 486 to Pentium and I knew those programs well. It
may come as a surprise for many people to learn that the 386 was the last
chip designed by "Americans"... over 60% of the staff on the 486 program
were foreigners, mostly Indians, Chinese, Russians, Pakistanis and Israelis.
The 486 was the last chip design run by an American manager, Pat Gelsinger.
With the 586 (renamed the "pentium") the percentage of foreign engineers
went over 90% and the manager in charge was Vhan Dham, an Indian. Why the
imbalance? Because it has gotten to the point that Americans are so bad at
math and other hard-core engineering disciplines that it is not easy to find
enough of them with the skills to do something as complex as create a
big-time chip like the Pentium or its successors. That's the same reason
most hard-core math and science graduate engineering programs in
universities are being kept alive by the foreign grad students that populate
them. [As a side riff, if you are worried about foreigners and sensitive IT
data you should get over the worry because most of the heavy lifting in the
US has long been done by a large percentage of foreigners who work here in
the US.] Intel, by the way, now has over 3500 engineers in China and is
said to be trying to expand its group in Russia to over 1500 engineers. I
would not be surprised if their contingent in India is even larger.
A final example: people used to have the same distrust of foreign
manufacturing for industrial and consumer goods. That's pretty much gone
now as just about all volume manufacturing has left the US for places like
China. Everything you say is just as valid for manufactured goods as it is
for GIS services (or any other service, for that matter). Is there any
doubt that as long as skill levels are eroding in the US and the
communications barriers to using foreign services keep declining that it is
only a matter of time before more and more services are internationalized,
just like manufacturing?
What's the solution to keeping more GIS jobs in the US? To do that in the
long term you need very high productivity despite the high cost of labor in
the US and I believe that productivity starts with education. If you really
want to keep high tech jobs in the US, march on down to your local school
board meeting and demand that they teach mathematics at least at the same
level and intensity that it is taught in, say, Bulgaria or Russia or some
other place that is serious about math education. That's a big step up, as
the US tends to end up in 26th or 27th place out of the 27 top
industrialized countries when it comes to the math education attainment of
our young people, whereas Russia is usually
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