[Rudy Hirschheim, Bauer College of Business, University of Houston Houston]

The outsourcing of IT globally has been one of the most prominent trends in IT over the past decade. More recently, we have seen a dramatic increase in the 'offshoring' of IS jobs to places like India and China. Even the popular press such as Business Week and USA Today have reported on this issue, noting that as much as 50% of IT jobs will be 'offshored' to India and other off -and near- shore destinations in the next 10 years. Such change the pundits argue is nothing more than the natural progression of first moving blue-collar work (manufacturing, textile production, etc.) overseas followed by white-collar work.

IT jobs are the most visible to us in the IS field but the same is happening (or will happen) in accounting, HR, and other business functions/processes (this is the so-called BPO or business process outsourcing phenomenon). Companies typically start with small offshore projects as a proof of concept. If successful, larger and more complex projects follow. Companies are scurrying to find offshore 'partners' because of the significant cost savings such arrangements bring.

With labor costs in India being in the order of 1/5 of what they are in the US and Europe, and the technical skills supposedly the equal or better, the argument for offshoring is compelling indeed. In this seminar, I will explore to what extent offshoring is a real phenomenon and report on the experiences of companies who have been using offshore outsourcing. I shall also speculate on what its long term implications for the field might be.

Bio

Rudy Hirschheim is the Ourso Family Distinguished Professor of Information Systems, in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department of Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. He previously was the Tenneco/Chase International Professor of Information Systems in the Bauer College of Business, University of Houston. During his sabbatical in 1996, he was the Sir Walter Scott Distinguished Visiting Professor, Australian Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. In 2000, he was the Ludwig Erhart Distinguished Professor at the University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany.

He has previously been on the faculties of Templeton College, Oxford and the London School of Economics. His Ph.D. is in Information Systems from the University of London. He and Richard Boland are the Consulting Editors of the John Wiley Series in Information Systems. He is on the editorial boards of the journals: Information and Organization; Information Systems Journal; Journal of Information Technology; Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Journal of the Association for Information Systems. He is past VP of Publications for the Association for Information Systems.