I am doing a project for one of the world’s leading companies in its domain. Everyone of you has/is still using one of their products. I cannot officially reveal the name as i have signed an NDA with them. The post below is purely a personal insight and opinion that i have gained from interacting with them, and no part can be treated as an official record.

I think American companies will continue to outsource IT to low cost countries. But there is a parallel process and job structure that has grown because of the process of outsourcing IT jobs. Read on…

In the late 90s and for most part of this decade, Indian IT firms have marched ahead in the quest for becoming leaders in the area of IT outsourcing. It made perfect sense for companies in North America and Europe to outsource their IT operations to vendors in low-cost countries such as India, China, Brazil and other smaller countries in Latin America.

The outsourcing wave of the West heralded the growth of stellar companies in the East that delivered consistent quality IT solutions to these companies. Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro developed as global IT firms that sought to deliver high quality solutions to customers.

Some of the things that worked in this ecosystem are low-cost of manpower, excellent talent as well as the advancement of the English language in these countries.

A lot has been written about outsourcing..especially IT outsourcing.And American companies have been receiving significant flak for outsourcing IT jobs to Bangalore, when thousands in America are being rendered jobless.

However there is a parallel job- structure that has been going hand in hand with outsourcing of IT.

This is Quality assurance and Quality control.

Wait a minute.I am not talking of quality of the core processes of the company. I am talking of the quality of the “outsourced process” itself.

American companies are significantly saving costs by outsourcing their IT. But they are investing in core smaller teams that make sure Indian companies such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro are actually doing their job well.

Here is a figment of what these quality teams actually do:

• They make sure that outsourced jobs are matching a certain quality standard.
• These quality standards are typically a function of the geographical spread of the outsourced vendors, their language, their communication (particulary applicable for call centers and BPO companies in India/Brazil).
• They make sure that the cost savings gained in outsourcing of jobs is not lost in the face of poor quality outsourced service which will ultimately affect their customers globally or in their country of operation (typically USA, UK etc).
• Ensure that their customers are not affected by the way outsourced vendors process the business operations.
• These quality teams in the companies have a mandate to make sure that at any given time, the outsourced vendor is delivering quality of service at a defined acceptable level.
• They do this by a consistent but random check on operations happening at outsourced locations.
• They have specific tools for doing so, and they also play a key role in providing feedback to their own managements for product improvements.

So while companies in the West are cutting jobs by outsourcing their IT and business processes, they are also creating jobs in their firms to monitor the quality of the outsourced work.

For most companies, this is more implicit. And its something that has been happening quite naturally. For most other companies this is a very formal business unit: quality control for outsourced business processes.

When companies first outsourced, they needed a few of their teams to actually monitor or track what is being outsourced.Sometimes, outsourced companies such as Infosys, TCS actually send their own personnel onsite to assist these teams.

For the most part, I am guessing that the equilibrium is shifting.
While the West initially built IT systems for their businesses, they are now building quality check systems to track the quality of the outsourced work.

Is this something to cheer about in the context of Indian outsource vendors? Debatable.

Will this continue for long?
I am not sure.

For now though, i d like to believe that there should not be a fear of losing jobs in USA coz of outsourcing IT to Bangalore. Coz for the most part, and i hope Barack Obama is reading this, there is a huge quality team that has been created in Buffalo for this outsourced job!! Well…atleast in a way!

Comments and opinions are welcome!

Shantan
(shantan.rao@gmail.com)

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