Offshoring Information Technology: Sourcing and Outsourcing to a Global Workforce

Carmel and Tjia have written an excellent book that is full of penetrating insights into the advantages and difficulties associated with offshoring.Anyone who manages globally dispersed teams is familiar with the problems that arise due to differences in culture, time zone, language, education, and professional expectations. Carmel and Tjia take a hard-nosed look at what the research actually shows about each of these topics.In some ways, the research confirmed what I was already seeing in terms of the difficulties associated with managing a dispersed team. But the applied research has provided me with new insights and ideas about how to overcome the obstacles and exploit the advantages of a dispersed team. I've read the book several times now, and I never come away from the book without a fresh idea of something I can try to make my team work together more smoothly.

A rather decent collection of thoughts, observations and study about the issues of IT projects over global distribution. It is a good source of reading to get a background on the true advantages and pitfalls one can face in offshoring. I enjoyed the read and it makes you better prepared to face the challenges or perhaps to understand the ones you are already in. The perspective does not all come from one source as the author has help writing and you get opinion as global as the topic. That in itself is well worth the read because it helps the US based reader understand how to see others and to see yourself!

This is a rather comprehensive look of why softwaredevelopment gets offshored and of how to do it rightshould you decide to try it yourself. The authors arean academic and a consultant, making the book anappealing blend of evidence-based theory and practicaladvice. The focus is primarily on softwaredevelopment, with some attention paid to suchIT-enabled services as call centers.The two most appealing things about the book are itsmaintenance of a practical tone and itscomprehensiveness in identifying the many things youneed to get right to get offshoring to work right. Forexample, international projects tend to get intoserious difficulty if the customer is unwilling orunable to provide sufficiently detailed specificationsto bring task ambiguity down to the level that cansurvive the communications problems caused by distanceand cultural differences.The authors put a lot of effort into explaining whysome countries have been successful at growing anoffshoring business and others not. This insight isvaluable for companies into offshoring for the longhaul, as you need to understand how wage rates andtechnology depth wax and wane over time.The book also has a number of chapters written byspecialists in such important ancillary areas asinternational contacts and managing culturaldifferences. All in all, a very useful book.

This volume is well-written, lucid and easy to follow. The authors have done an excellent job in providing an explanatory framework for offshoring, as well as giving a realistic look at potential costs and benefits. Their list of suggestions and guidelines is comprehensive. The book avoids the trap of becoming overly technical and steers clear of being specific to any particular country or industry. I was pleasantly surprised to find chapters on such important topics as country-specific legal pitfalls, privacy rights issues, and how to sell the idea of offshoring inside a company resistant to the idea. The authors livened up their material with numerous case studies to illustrate key points. The level of detail they provided on how to write a solid Service Level Agreement (SLA) was also impressive.Overall this was an excellent volume, and the only two objections that I have are both minor. First, the book could benefit from a small amount of updating; some of the data, especially in Part I of book, dates from 2001-2003. In any other discipline, that would still be considered fairly recent. However in technology, that verges on being stale. In addition, that was the period of the global downturn in IT. The authors' data would be obviously impacted by that global economic event. To be clear: I do not believe that any of the authors' points would be reversed by updating the data. On the contrary, I expect that current data would only strengthen their points, as the trends they identified have only accelerated since the book's first publication. Second, as noted earlier the authors provided several cases of companies who tried offshoring and either failed, or suffered setbacks. Given the fact that offshoring is not the cure-all for every company, it would have also been useful to see a couple of case studies of companies who investigated the offshoring option but decided against it. It is just as important to understand why a company declines to offshore, as it is to understand why they would undertake to do so.This is a book that I wish I had read before working on several offshoring/outsourcing projects for former employers. It is highly recommended for anyone who is contemplating the offshore option, or who has recently been put in charge of making such an option successful.