IT departments send their infrastructure labor offshore primarily to take advantage of lower costs, but there are other advantages too. The offshoring of infrastructure labor can act as a catalyst for operational improvements and the implementation of a global operating model that provides more support to applications and users, no matter where they operate from.
Hiring people with the required skillsets is getting easier in places such as South Asia, Asia Pacific and Eastern Europe. Some IT infrastructure technologies are easier to offshore than others: depending on the task, companies may be able to offshore from 40 to 50 percent of the staff in certain areas such as servers or internal help desk. Leading companies that began moving their internal IT help desk operations and UNIX server monitoring, management, and support work to India circa 2004, have seen mammoth savings in unit labor costs of as much as at least 30%. Eyeing this opportunity, vendors have ramped up their skills, and a lot of them now offer a broad range of network, help desk, distribution, and application integration capabilities. They also capitalize on the industry trend of data migration from old technological bases to latest ones.
Many companies house their infrastructure in local or regional operations. For this reason, technologies, processes, and services are scattered around the globe, making it harder for infrastructure companies to support increasingly global business processes and apps. The opportunity to consolidate labor in a low-cost offshore center can act as a forcing mechanism to consolidate infrastructure operations and thus raise service levels for applications and users—for example, by providing affordable 24/7 support. In addition, some companies that have already moved some of their application-development and business operations offshore find that moving their infrastructure staffs as well offers economies of scale for facilities, data communications, and training.
Most IT executives understand the basic planning requirements for offshoring the development of applications. Deciding which infrastructure activities can be offshored is relatively different, somewhat because the reliability of infrastructure affects business operations directly, and also because people who perform infrastructure roles work closely with other functions such as operations and third-party vendors. Given these “bottlenecks”, managers planning a move must evaluate whether jobs under offshore consideration require proximity to senior management, application designers, vendors, or machines. Indubitably, any function requiring close access to any of these onshore resources is a poor candidate for offshoring. What’s more, in some countries and industries, regulations limit cross-border access to customer data, so any role requiring such access would not be wholly transferable. Any entity that offshores work should take these elements into consideration for a seamless transition.
-
About the Author:
OvexTech is a provider of BPO services with presence in the US, China and Pakistan. (www.ovextech.net)
Article Source
