Corvus Consulting

Though there are questions arising about how far away you can send some operations to save money, many companies still look to offshoring as a viable development option.

Though this trend makes things tougher for many in the domestic IT sector, it places a higher premium on the need for information architects who can not only design the connection between software and customers, but can also communicate those details to someone an ocean away.

What is Offshoring?

The basic idea of offshoring is to save money by hiring people in other countries to do your development work for less money than the domestic market. The most popular destinations for offshore work are China, India, the Philippines and Russia, as well as a few smaller Western nations, such as New Zealand. And after seemingly arriving on the scene out of nowhere, they are staking out a significant share of the market for software development.

Forrester Research reports that over 27,000 IT were sent offshore in 2000, and predicts that over 100,000 jobs will follow by 2005, and over 472,000 by 2015 [1].
A.T. Kearney predicts much higher numbers, with 500,000 financial services jobs moving offshore in the next five years, and a sizable share of that number being software-related positions [2].

Opponents of offshoring point to tradeoffs in software quality, innovation and security as the tradeoffs for the dollar savings found in moving software projects to overseas companies, but the reality has so far proven otherwise.

An illuminating testimonial comes from a former colleague, who describes his experience working from the UK with a development team based in India:

All the fears about working with a foreign team were unfounded. They were just as competent as domestic workers, worked with the latest tools and methodologies; they were professional, highly creative and delivered on time and budget. The only real difference was that their work cost us half as much, if that.
A look at a few websites for Indian software development firms matches this praise [3]. They offer a polished presentation that dedicates a lot of focus to selling outsourcing as a service, rather than as a strategy. They know all the buzzwords and the English on the site is perfect – there is no opening for parody here.

It can be tempting to believe that overseas developers are not working on the high-profile commercial products and websites; just client-specific jobs, the grapevine says. But it turns out that those public projects are exactly the ones that offshore developers are trying to win. Consultants who guide businesses though the process of offshoring their labour also pitch strongly to this market [4]. And they are making those big wins, too; Microsoft is using them, and plans to keep doing so [5].

There seem to be many signs that offshoring is a more than just a fad born out of intensified cost cutting – it is a major shift in the tech economy and a reality to be reckoned with by tech workers in the West.

What are the risks to businesses associated with offshoring?
Of course, the rewards of offshoring do not come without some risks.

The lack of direct oversight and a common legal environment mean that intellectual property rights may be put at risk.
The risks from changes in the political relations of some overseas nations can radically and quickly change the environment in which your products are being produced.
Customers may be uncertain about any number of real or imagined issues, such as personal data security, software reliability, and yes, even working conditions for the developers themselves [6].
And there is an additional, and I believe more insidious risk to software projects that are outsourced to overseas developers. That is the risk of failure from disorganized communication and ambiguous or erroneous information. Ensuring that the intentions, goals, changes and status updates are clearly understood becomes more difficult when working across time zones, language dialects and the inability to interact in person. The true extent to which the problem of dysfunctional communication in software development affects offshored software projects is probably quite hard to determine, but it is not hard to see that it is real and a risk best managed.

Where does the Domestic Analyst Fit In?
Let’s assume for now that offshoring is here to stay. Let’s further assume that offshoring will not reduce the IT job market to a dusty skeleton wherever software jobs are moved offshore. The need for clear communication intensifies the need for quality source documentation for the developers, such as the business requirements and vision for the product. Producing these documents and maintaining them through the project or even product lifecycle is a natural part of an analyst’s job.

But there is an additional role that can be realized through a communication-focussed analyst. As a team member who has exposure to many other key stakeholders, the analyst is well-suited to helping ensure that communication channels are organized, and that the right information gets to the right people. This description of an analyst or writer in an offshored software project necessarily involves a reduced role in producing development documentation, but re-captures that effort in ensuring that communication needs between distant offices are met. Many projects do not dedicate scheduled time to this kind of effort, yet all would certainly acknowledge the benefits of quality development documentation.

By balancing the loss of specification work with a focus on quality communication between stakeholders and the offshore developer, analysts can help minimize the problems introduced by poor communication. The benefits are clear to any developer or client who has heard the words “I thought you meant something different” on the brink of completing a project milestone.

References

1. Forrester Research
2. AT Kearny
3. Intellix
4. Rave-Tech
5. CNet
6. Salon