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CM Journal Articles HR Corner: Oh no! I've Been Off-shored!
CM Journal Articles HR Corner: Oh no! I've Been Off-shored!
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The English Language has assimilated many new words and terms. People refer to “googling” as if it is a verb in everyday language. Many IT professionals refer to being “off-shored” as the event where management fires you and gives your work to someone in a far away country (India) who is willing to work for a fraction of your salary. I recently heard about “on-shoring” – when the off-shore project fails and they bring it back! The threat of being off-shored brings up many emotions (e.g. fear & anger) among many IT professionals. One of my colleagues recently went to India to work on off-shoring some work. This friend had a different perspective which made me stop and think. Is off-shoring good for us? What should our reaction be? Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift… Confronting the Fear Edwards Deming talked a lot about the importance of driving out fear in his well known works on Quality Management. Fear can be devastating. I volunteer a lot of my free (and not so free) time to patrol as an Auxiliary Police Lieutenant in Brooklyn . Wearing a police uniform (with a tiny patch that says Auxiliary on the side) can be a challenging experience. When things happen people expect you to know exactly what to do. Even “real” cops, fresh out of the Academy, will stop and ask me questions (sometimes I even know the answers!). One thing that I had to confront was my own fear. I am not exactly Rambo. At 5’4” and a little overweight I don’t exactly present as a tough guy. (I never did.) Sometimes I would look at people hanging out on the street (who I suspected were involved with drugs sales or crimes) and they would stare back at me and start to challenge me, even threaten me. Sure I could call the “real” cops but that does sort of defeat the purpose of me being out there on patrol. It turned out that I just had to confront my own fear. One day I got the idea of just saying, “hey, what’s up?” instead of just ignoring them. Many tough looking guys just smiled back and said hello back. After a while I realized that some of them had thought that I was being cold by not acknowledging them. I showed some respect and they showed it back. Now I teach other civilians how to patrol their streets (and develop Civilian Patrols) and the non-confrontational greeting is one of the most important techniques that I use. Confronting fear is essential. Technology Athletes Many of us fail to realize that technology professionals today need to exercise their technical skills in much the same way that athletes exercise to strive for excellence. Who would want to watch baseball if the players were not striving to constantly set new records and accomplishments? We expect Technology to improve daily. We want our cell phones, answering machines and appliances to be smarter, more efficient and less expensive. We all expect Personal Computers to cost less and do more every 4 – 6 months! We are part of the technology revolution and in many ways we have to study just as hard as medical doctors just to stay on top of the changing technology. We also need to be flexible in terms of what we do on a daily basis. Technology professionals who can adapt, learn and work well on a team are always in demand. Let’s emphasize the teamwork. Imagine if you needed an operation. Wouldn’t you want your doctor to be knowledgeable, flexible and the entire team to put everything they could into their efforts to make your operation a success. I have been privileged to work along firemen, emergency service, police and other EMTs on many rescues (I’ll confess that as a volunteer EMT, I usually pick the easiest job and try to stay out of the way of the “professionals”). The teamwork is inspiring and desire to improve is a lesson that I keep in mind at all times. Sometimes (e.g. when there is a language barrier and I know the foreign language) I take the lead and I try to put everything that I can into my efforts to help someone who is sick or injured. I treat every person on my ambulance as if they are a member of my family. I am constantly inspired by the work of firemen and other rescue professionals. I don’t believe that all technology professionals put in this kind of effort. Yet technology saves lives too and daily we see just how important our work is to society and the world. Many of us learn a computer language and then feel that we can relax and “just do our job”. Technology is changing. Are you flexible? Can you adapt and grow and get better each day? Are you up to the challenge of a truly global IT? The Globalization of IT The real point of the “off-shore” movement is that we can work anywhere. We can form organizations on a virtual basis and then manage the work regardless of the physical location of the workers. A year or so ago I got to take care of my 96 year grandmother during the last days of her life. In order to do this I needed to work from home a lot. Most of my colleagues had no idea that half the time I was online from my basement. The important thing was that I was there (online) and responsive to whatever they needed. My colleagues in Dallas and Chicago had no idea if I was in NYC, New Jersey or my home in Brooklyn . Globalization is essential to remove many geographic barriers that effect people today. In Poor Countries Recently a few of my colleagues came back from India where they evaluated data centers and IT resources available to work. There was a lot of mixed feedback. Some IT shops there practice Level 5 CMM quality management practices. There certainly is a lot of software being written in Chennai these days, even though it may not be everyone’s first choice as a place to live and raise a family. Another colleague expressed grave concerns about the quality of their electrical utilities (this was a week before the entire NorthEast US lost power in a massive blackout that is still not fully explained). He complained that electrical problems were frequent and that long distance phone calls were often terminated before they were completed. Another friend of mine mentioned that he saw children living and sleeping on the streets. I could tell that his first thought was perhaps this off-shore work could help improve the economy of a country that has a lot of very poor people. The interesting note here is that businesses are not off-shoring to be nice corporate citizens. They are off-shoring because they believe it makes business sense. My father always maintained that good corporate citizens helped the community and their own company by making honest and intelligent decisions that helped everyone. Where do you Stand? Are you prepared to meet the challenges that are ahead? Should we be upset because other people are getting jobs that we could do (at a higher cost)? As a corporate citizen I am just wondering if off-shoring some work might help poorer nations earn their way out of poverty and technology professionals may be leading the way by making IT a global reality. CM is key to these efforts because global IT still needs a centralized code repository. Teamwork and technical flexibility are also essential. In many ways IT professionals have a unique opportunity to contribute to a healthy global economy that can help our own companies, ourselves and greater world community. Bob Aiello is a Senior Editor for Crossroads News and an Associate Director at a major financial services firm in NYC, where he has company wide responsibility for Software Configuration and Release Management best practices. Bob is on the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he is also the chair of the CM SIG which meets in Midtown NYC. Mr. Aiello has a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a BS in Computer Science from Hofstra. You can reach Mr. Aiello by email at raiello@acm.org
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| Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 January 2006 05:29 |
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