India's outsourcing bubble is bursting

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RE: India's outsourcing bubble is bursting

I have the opportunity see the quality of delivery close at hand and compare it to the quality of delivery Amiercan incumbents (I mean service providers) provide. I'm not quoting propaganda. Yes, there are failures- and I see the same kind and number of failures in the other incumbents' engagements as well. The fact is that, whether the service provider is onsite or offshore, the success of an engagement depends on many factors, some being the responsibility of the provider to mitigate, some because of inherent cultural disconnects that take time to change and some- in my opinion many- because the client simply doesn't know how to deal effectively with a service provider.

I could name innumerable instances of US companies- service providers, infrastructure vendors, software vendors- slipping in their schedules. A CIO remarked recently that when you deal with IBM ina large engagement, you need to be prepared to face 6 lawyers if you make any change to the scope of the engagement. I have seen Oracle and SAP selling software that crashed when a certain number of users logged on to it, and this was mentioned nowhere when they sold the software; then they suggest patches or new API implementations with no guarantee of the application responding better, I have seen large consulting companies claiming process knowledge over technical expertise and discipline and messing up enterprise application implementation projects so badly that mass firings of sniro executives were imminent due to their mishandling the project. I do not mean to say that all US companies do this.

I don't mean to belilttle our clients or other companies. All I'm saying is that the anti-outsourcing voices often quote low quality delilvery. There are clients who get better delivery than others. Who will you believe? The larger Indian service providers are moving to a model that is very slective in providing services to clients. Clients who want a staff augmentation type engagement are considered undesirable and clients who would rather engage with us in a manageable scale and with clearly defined service levels are considered desirable. Also clients which give value added work and consider the partnership strategic in nature are preferred over the others. So many factors lead to the success or failure of these engagements.

Having said that, I do understand why people protest- even if no complaints were raised about the quality of work, the anti-outsourcing voices will remain, and that is because people do not like to be replaced in their jobs. It's plain and simple. I feel for these people. Unfortunately, within the free trade paradigm I do not think that situation will change. If the US sells things to India the US is also compelled to buy from India. Under the circumstances the best one could do in the US is to build greater value to one's expertise.

Posted by: vijay_1976   Posted on: 10/01/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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