Knowledge Work

Blogging is good for your career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.

Ben Day blogged his way into a career as a high-earning software consultant while maintaining the freedom to schedule frequent jam sessions and performances as a keyboard player.

Blogging gave him the opportunity to stand out enough to support the life he envisioned for himself. ‘’For your career, a blog is essential,” says Phil van Allen, a faculty member of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

‘’It’s the new public relations and it’s the new home page. Instead of a static home page, you have your blog,” he said. It’s a way to let people know what you are thinking about the field that interests you.

Blogs ‘essential’ to a good career - The Boston Globe (April 16, 2006)

Outsourcing of information technology and business services delivers average cost savings of 15 percent, a survey found on Thursday, disproving market claims that outsourcing can reduce costs by more than 60 percent.

After professional fees, severance pay and governance costs, savings range between 10 percent and 39 percent, with the average level at 15 percent when contracts are first let, according to outsourcing advisory firm TPI.

“This research proves that the promise of massive operational savings is unrealistic when you take into account the costs of procurement and ongoing contract management,” Duncan Aitchison, TPI’s managing director, said in a statement.

Survey: Outsourcing saves less than claimed | Tech News on ZDNet

When a Sunnyvale tech company laid off the manager and most of his colleagues in its reliability testing group a year and a half ago, the manager said a few employees were spared — younger, foreign workers on H-1B visas.

The laid-off manager was infuriated that as an American citizen, he wasn’t given priority over the H-1B employees. The H-1B visa program allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers when there’s a shortage of available American workers.

“The law does not protect American workers at all,'’ said Frank, a 45-year-old Chinese-American who was out of work for five months, and who insisted his last name and the name of his former company not be published because he fears repercussions from potential employers. “It only helps American businesses and technology companies keep their costs low while sacrificing American workforce. That’s not right.'’

MercuryNews.com | 04/07/2006 | H-1B visa law criticized

Some major acquisitions activity, possibly presaging a trend towards consolidation, in the Indian offshore/outsourcing space.  EDS has apparently just picked up a big chunk (in excess of 40%) of Mphasis:

The EDS-Mphasis deal is part of an ongoing trend that has software and BPO firms shifting large parts of their operations to India. IBM Global, in the last four years, has built its India base from scratch to 40,000 employees—more than a quarter of its estimated 150,000 US workforce. Accenture’s count of its India hands is at 20,000.

The rest among the industry leaders have lagged behind. EDS, Capgemini and Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) had 3,000 to 5,000-strong offshore teams in India. “Apart from IBM and Accenture, all of them took their eyes off the ball,” says Ganesh Natarajan, deputy chairman and managing director at Zensar Technologies.

If the EDS buy of Mphasis goes through, it will grow its India presence nearly four times adding the target’s 11,000 workers in India and another 1,000 elsewhere to its rolls. “This helps our service delivery and brings in new software application development skills,” says an EDS spokesman In addition, having Mphasis in its stable will allow to bid for contracts less than $100 million, a size it has traditionally stayed away from.

The Great Indian Tech Sale (Financial Express, Bombay, India)

Is the layoff the great American wound? In Louis Uchitelle’s account, it seems a wound in triplicate. It hollows out companies so they can’t compete. It hollows out the country by removing middle-class jobs. It hollows out the middle-class employees who are laid off and then too often drop permanently to a demeaning, low-wage way of life. To Mr. Uchitelle, who reports on economics for The New York Times, corporate America’s addiction to the layoff has gone past the point of economic rationality. In this fascinating book he tries to tell the history of the United States in our time as the unchecked rise of layoffs.

[…]

The layoff, Mr. Uchitelle argues, has transformed the nation. At least 30 million full-time American employees have gotten pink slips since the Labor Department belatedly started to count them in 1984. But add in the early retirees, the “quits” who saw the layoffs coming, and the number is much higher — a whole ghost nation trekking into what for most will be lower-wage work. This is the Dust Bowl in our Golden Bowl, and to Mr. Uchitelle, layoffs in one way are worse than the unemployment of the 1930’s. At least then, most of the jobless came back to better-paid, more secure jobs. Those laid off in our time almost never will.

‘The Disposable American,’ by Louis Uchitelle - New York Times

Many who blame outsourcing providers when things go wrong don’t have the maturity to understand their own responsibilities.

[…]

A well thought-through and managed outsourcing relationship should obviate the need for recourse to contracts, says Jeremy Tipper, managing director of Capital Consulting. And the process should start by the client thinking long and hard about whether it should be outsourcing at all.

Human Resources Magazine - HR Outsourcing: Outsourcing for grown ups

In case you’ve been worrying about how the war in Iraq will end, or the coming of avian flu, or the extinction of the universe as we drift into the cosmic void, well, relax. Here’s something you should really fret about: the future of the U.S. economy in the age of globalization.

For a discussion of same, let me call your attention to an article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs by Princeton University economist Alan Blinder…

In the new global order, Blinder writes, not just manufacturing jobs but a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services look safe. “Janitors and crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition,” Blinder writes, “accountants and computer programmers are not.”

Let me break it down for you in even simpler language. I’ve spent the last couple of years working for the outsourcing division of a major multinational consulting firm (I’m moving on to a new job next month, after taking a long-delayed vacation/rest break) and I can state this with a high degree of confidence:

If (a) you are primarily a knowledge worker whose job does not demand your physical presence, and (b) if your job can be reduced to a set of written instructions and described in conventional language that other professionals can understand, you’ve already been outsourced and/or offshored; you just don’t know it yet. (Credit goes to Bruce Sterling via Kottke for the seed that sprouted this observation.)

And if this piques your interest, here are the two most important things I think you need to do to hold on to your (professional-class) job in the New Economy:

• Work on your “soft skills” and on creating hard-to-find (but needed) combinations of skills. If you’re primarily a technical guy, work like hell on your business and communications skills! If you’re primarily on the business side, get technically literate, fast.
• Focus on roles that require your presence. You may dig the idea of working from home, but if you can telecommute to your job from your house or apartment, a guy who’s much hungrier and much cheaper than you are can probably do it from Bangalore, Krakow, Prague or Shanghai.

Will Your Job Survive? (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post)

Related:

• Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution? (Alan Blinder, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006)

Richard J. Newman of US News and World Report has some good advice, for those of you for whom this is an option: Invest in corporate America. Just don’t work there.

Newman notes that as trends towards outsourcing and offshoring accelerate, US companies are more profitable and competitive than ever.

The job outlook for US workers, however… not so much.

There’s a growing wedge between U.S. companies and their American employees. What used to be good for General Motors, so to speak, also used to be good for the Americans who worked for General Motors. In many ways (putting labor disputes aside), the interests of U.S. companies and U.S. workers were closely aligned, especially when borders were harder to breach and trade seemed like more of a zero-sum game.

[…]

What is good for General Motors these days is massive cost-cutting, to help reverse an enormous $10.6 billion loss in 2005 and keep the company afloat. And the way companies cut costs these days is by shipping any work that is transferable overseas and building stuff there, too. In the old days, of course, the fortunes of companies and their workers rose and fell in unison; manufacturers laid off U.S. workers when times were tough and rehired them when business picked up. But jobs that go overseas are gone forever, or at least until assembly line workers and engineers in China and India start to earn the same as their American counterparts. And that’s not going to happen before the unemployment insurance runs out. Companies exist to make money, not to keep people employed. But U.S. companies can increasingly make money while bypassing American workers. “The fate of U.S. workers is no longer part of corporate decision making,” says [coauthor of Outsourcing America Ronald] Hira. That sounds ominous, yet for Americans with the energy to get off the couch and pay attention, it’s an opportunity. Those who are creative, entrepreneurial, well educated, and able to consistently learn the latest skills will thrive. But if you have the choice, it’s probably better to be a stockholder of corporate America than an employee.

Invest in corporate America. Just don’t work there (USNews.com)

The dominance of English as the world’s top language — until recently an advantage to both Britain and the United States — is now beginning to undermine the competitiveness of both nations, according to a major research report.

The report commissioned by the British Council says monolingual English graduates “face a bleak economic future” as multilingual competitors flood into the workforce from all corners of the globe.

A massive increase in the number of people learning English is under way and likely to peak at around 2 billion in the next decade, according to the report entitled “English Next.”

More than half of all primary school children in China now learn English and the number of English speakers in India and China — 500 million — now exceeds the total number of mother-tongue English speakers elsewhere in the world.

Global spread of English threatens US, UK: study - Reuters via Yahoo! News

The globalization of work tends to start from the bottom up. The first jobs to be moved abroad are typically simple assembly tasks, followed by manufacturing, and later, skilled work like computer programming. At the end of this progression is the work done by scientists and engineers in research and development laboratories.

A new study that will be presented today to the National Academies, the nation’s leading advisory groups on science and technology, suggests that more and more research work at corporations will be sent to fast-growing economies with strong education systems, like China and India.

Outsourcing Is Climbing Skills Ladder - New York Times (February 17. 2006)

We’re definitely into act two of the outsourcing drama. TPI notes that the first-generation deals are all now coming up for review—they expect to see €36.5bn of renewals in 2006 rising to €40.8bn in 2007—over a fifth of the total market. Although historically 90% of renewals go to incumbents this still represents a huge opportunity for the “chasing group” as many of these deals date from a period where the choice of providers was very narrow. IBM and EDS in particular will have to look to their laurels, as it’s clear that clients are casting the net wider. TPI figures reflect this diversity—in the $40m plus bracket, 36 different providers signed more than two contracts, up from 29 in the previous year. Clearly this is partly due to the fact that outsourcing is becoming attractive to smaller and smaller clients. There’s certainly anecdotal evidence to suggest that smaller clients often feel a bit overlooked in the Big Six world. But the Big Six’s share of the Top 50 deals also declined—with more deals going to European and Indian providers.

The march of the Indian providers makes fascinating reading. In 2004 they took just 1% of both contracts and total contract value. Last year this had increased to 6% of contracts and 4% of value. It’s easy to see why Wipro, for example, was able to grow profits by 24% this year.

Figures like this are almost impossible to extrapolate, but I suspect this is only the beginning of the story as far as Indian providers are concerned. They are still facing huge inertial friction with European and US clients—the brands are not well-known, they do not have the client contact based on consultancy or IT assignments. But all that can change very rapidly. Ten years ago very few western executives would have had call to visit India. Now, as a result of outsourcing, many companies have active commercial links with the Sub-continent. It’s not scary or unknown any more. That growing familiarity with Indian business culture may be the biggest threat to the dominance of the Big Six.

Consulting Times: Outsourcing enters a new era