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Cyber Age : ND BATRA Offshoring is brain-sharing
Corporate America is primarily beholden to its investors and would do whatever it takes to stay competitive and profitable in the global marketplace. If staying financially healthy means offshoring jobs to India and other places, so be it. That was the consensus that emerged from a panel discussion, Inside Outsourcing, organised by the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business last week.
The panel was organised to coincide with a theatre performance of Alladeen, a stage docudrama more or less in the tradition of Elmer Rice’s Living Newspaper and Bertolt Brecht’s Documentary Theater. The presentation blends live performance with hi-tech video and electronic music dramatising how Bangalore mimics US and British accents to manage its myriad call centres. Keith Khan, who directs the performance (along with Marianne Weem), is a Brit of Trinidad origin. But look at his name! Half Anglican, half Indian Muslim. And the name of his arts-technology company is Moti Roti (big bread)! Alladeen shows how cultures are blending and identities are leaking into each other in the global village. Khan, who calls himself a “spectacularist”, was also on the discussion panel.
Jack Freker, president of Convergys’ Customer Management Group, made an interesting distinction between outsourcing, which companies have been doing within the USA for many years, and offshoring, having work done abroad, which is comparatively a recent phenomenon. Inside outsourcing, one company outsourcing some of its functions to another, keeps jobs within the country; offshoring gives the misleading impression that jobs are being exported. If a job is moved from Seattle to Detroit, it’s internal outsourcing; but if it crosses over to Toronto, Canada, it’s offshoring, a hot political issue in the election year. As the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry says, George Bush has been creating jobs, of course, but for China.
Freker’s Convergys is a service company that “creates and services a full range of live agents, web-enabled and technology-based contact center solutions.” Offshoring is one of its major businesses for which the company has offices in 40 countries, including India. During the discussion, he showed great sensitivity as well as admiration towards India, while assuring the audience that offshoring not only creates more jobs within the country but better ones too.
Paul Gaffney, the executive vice-president, Supply Chain, at Staples, Inc., one of the biggest office supplies companies, with operations in several countries including Canada, did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. Get used to offshoring, which is a consequence of globalisation, he said. It is not a question of survival but of pleasing the investor who cares more for the return than a feeling of altruism about jobs.
The broad consensus among the panelists, including Sonal Shah, associate director for Economic and Foreign Policy at the Center for American Progress, was that only low-level jobs are being offshored to countries like India. So corporations are asking their employees to upend their skills for better jobs. But so are the Indians, I believe. And a common joke that has been popping up in cyberspace is, why don’t US companies offshore the jobs of jailed CEOs to India? Which prompted me to ask the panelists a question that provoked a laugh: What are the jobs that cannot be outsourced to India? A professor’s job, quipped Prof. Paul Argenti, the moderator, who recently returned from India and expressed amazement at the offshoring work being done in Bangalore and other centres.
Both Gaffney of Staples and Freker of Convergys said that jobs that require strategic thinking and creativity couldn’t be offshored to India. Gentlemen, I wanted to say, don’t be so sure. It is only a matter of time when the USA would ask for more brains from India. What probably is needed is to re-educate the US public in that offshoring jobs is tantamount to inshoring brains. It is in this area that Tuck’s Center for Digital Strategies and other US business schools could play a role in changing the perception of the American people, especially politicians. The USA is not losing jobs to India; it is gaining access to India’s brain.
While the panelists were cautiously though unapologetically explaining why offshoring has become an irreversible trend and a corporate necessity, IBM was quietly announcing that it would acquire India’s third largest offshoring company, Gurgaon-based Daksh e-Services. Information Week headlined that IBM’s Indian acquisition would be “seen as stamp of recognition” and “could trigger similar moves by other US companies.” What IBM’s spokesperson, Varsha Chainani, told AP sums up the attitude of the corporate global toward offshoring: “Our shareholders expect us to tap opportunities in the developing world. And we are aggressively expanding our reach in India.” If IBM comes calling India, can rest of corporate America be far behind?
On the heel of the IBM news came another unexpected announcement that InfoSys Technologies, India’s second largest software technology company, plans to invest $20 million in the USA that would create 500 consulting jobs. Infosys’ CEO Nandan Nilekani said that as his company expands its global footprint, it would create “local employment in the countries we operate.” Offshoring is not a one-way street.
(ND Batra is Professor of Communications, Norwich University, Vermont.)
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