Hey, remember the 90’s and Bill Clinton signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)? Remember how offshoring and outsourcing were going to lift all our boats and send all the grungy no good very bad jobs somewhere else, so we would all end up as total glam rock stars lounging about in Herman Miller office chairs at ergonomic workstations, taking Very Important calls and meetings, becoming the information workers of the future?
Yeah, me neither. Offshoring (moving jobs to another country) and outsourcing (moving business functions like Information Technology to another company, because they are deemed not critical to a company’s core business) had the spiffy side effect of creating a poorly received sitcom on NBC which featured thinly veiled racism, as well as knocking the bottom rung off the ladder of the American workplace.
Taking advantage of work-anywhere communications technology, offshoring moved low-skilled jobs to other countries, where the work force was able to read and speak English while receiving a fraction of the pay that an American worker would be paid. Outsourcing, on the other hand, moved entire classes of jobs from one company to another. On the surface, it made sense to move an IT department to an outsourcing firm, because that firm already had seasoned IT people who were available around the clock. If someone at the outsourcing firm took a day off, not a problem, because they always had someone to back them up. This was a big plus for small and medium businesses who couldn’t afford to have two “I.T. Guys” on the payroll.
Throughout the 90’s and aughties, companies jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon, thinking they could save money on IT staff and still get the support they needed. Were they ever wrong. Poorly written contracts are and were the norm. Critical items are frequently left out of scope discussions, leaving huge support gaps that are hastily filled. When the transition to outsourcing happens, key employees leave and take years of accumulated knowledge with them, and the staff at the outsourcer is left to try to piece together support for systems with no documentation while the customer screams at them.
Guess what! American corporations, tired of overpaying for less than stellar offshore staff and outsourced functions, and really super tired of apologizing for poor customer service, are starting to insource (move business functions back in-house) and onshore (move jobs back to America), creating opportunities for the great unwashed masses Americans who are looking for jobs.
Insourcing news: Best Buy got themselves a brand new lady CIO. The first thing she did was tear up the contract with Best Buy’s IT outsourcer, and announce she was hiring 200 IT professionals so she could move IT back in-house. News release is here and you can look for some of the newly created jobs here.
Onshoring news: US Airways announced today that they are moving call center work back to the US. They expect to move 400 jobs to their call centers in Winston-Salem, Phoenix, and Reno.
I always knew that the pendulum would swing back to companies wanting to take control of their own destiny. Now, let’s get out there and get to gettin!
p.s.: want to read even more about this trend? Check out this article at Ars Technica.
