In the Business Week article, India: Good Help is Hard to Find, Josey Puliyenthuruthel and Manjeet Kripalani discuss the pains of finding and retaining skilled talent in global IT firms based in India. As a consultant at Infosys, I have seen the other side of the house. I am a senior technical architect with Infosys, one of the companies mentioned in the article. In fact, Infosys is the only one of the "big three" (the others being TCS and Wipro) that is based on a pure services model - we don't sell any products - and our roots are in 100% client consulting.
As I was saying, I am an architect with Infosys. And I am hired out of the US. This is what I would term the "reverse offshore model." Notice I say "offshoring," not "oursourcing." Let me elaborate. The outsourcing model in IT works on the basis of delegating IT work to third party consulting companies. The "offshoring" model is a specialized extension of the outsourcing model, where the delegation is to IT consulting companies based in Asia, where the cost of development is a fraction of the cost here.
And now we come to the reverse offshore model. Take me, for instance. I am employed by a company that specializes in the offhoring mode of outsourcing. But I am a US citizen, hired in the US. That means I am paid in US dollars. This in turn means that Infosys has to charge their clients US consulting rates in order to make a profit on my US salary. Why would the clients pay this rate? And why would Infosys work in this mode - since it is against the basic IT consulting model on which the company is built?
The reason is based on pure need. In the article India: Good Help is Hard to Find, the authors elaborated on the shortage of skilled middle management resources in India. The need for senior consultants at my level arises because of an even larger gap in skills and capabilities for strategic technical work for US based clients. Such resources are not available offshore due to several reasons. For example, I am a J2EE/Java/Web/Enterprise/etc. consultant with 15 years of experience. It is going to be hard to find someone with that experience in India, with the experience of dealing with US customers. Too, in Asia based consulting organizations, the majority of consultants with 5+ years of experience usually go into technical management/project management or research. So in order to engage in strategic projects, there is a need for US based resources in a specialized technical field (in my case, the platform being J2EE), who can work at client sites. That narrows down the availability of the right resources to a handful.
The challenge for the global IT consulting companies is not only to find the right resources, but to support the vision of the reverse model. Strategic consulting offered in this manner needs to be considered an investment - with the probability of more work being delegated offshore.
