Re: Rural Sourcing

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Crump, Mike
<Mike.Crump@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I would say that right now our management thinks that offshoring is the
answer to any application problem that we have. To them it is the

Ah. That sounds like the whole "outsource to eastern europe" that
seems to be all the rage in the CxO range of people here.

Well, i'll try to offer you a different perspective here - Switzerland
is very small, and a lot of stuff we buy comes from almost everywhere.
For example, most of the IT equipment we buy comes from the United
States (manufactured in China, though). We also often work with
service providers from neighboring countries like Austria and Germany
(which have the advantage of speaking German, which a large part of
Switzerland also speaks).

The same goes for Software - United States, Germany, France, etc.

In the end, what is important is the quality of the work you get.
Skilled workers from Germany and Austria are available, but they're
not local. So for some work it might make sense to hire a German, e.G.
if physical presence is not required. But a German might not know how
a lot of regional Stuff work, or that we're using different words for
the same thing, etc. There is a notable cultural Gap between
Germany/Austria/Switzerland, even though it might not be visible on
the first look (even though the countries share a native language and
tv programs).

The Off-Shoring deal seems to run into the line of outsourcing to
cheaper countries, like some people are doing here with Eastern
Europe. There are some brilliant people there, but the problem is
usually the language barrier.

Outsourcing to e.G. India from the US seems to pose the same language
problem, but also adds the time shift (plus an even bigger cultural
gap).

In the end, as a technical person, one should concentrate on the
quality of the work. Can this person/company provide the necessary
quality? If yes, i don't think it matters much where it is located.
But i can't imagine that it will work out in the end.

e.G. IBM outsourced all administrative tasks in Europe to Romania. It
is hard to get someone on the phone who can speak/write decent German.
It is even harder to explain them the details of the Swiss MWST (~ US
Sales Tax). This makes it especially painful when dealing with wrong
invoices etc.

Switzerland <-> Romania is around 2000km
Seattle <-> New York is around 5000km