Right now, the internet is filled with the buzz of consultants comparing different countries, testing their suitability for offshore outsourcing. The  magazine BusinessWeek has been focusing on the upstarts – those nations out to take business from India, arguably wearing the offshoring crown at present.

I know that I have recently been writing about the potential for Africa in the offshore outsourcing market, but I wouldn’t want to stoke the fire of a country vs country battle, where Uganda claims to be ‘better’ than India or Vietnam claims to be ‘better’ than Singapore. The debate is too difficult to generalise. Certain types of business process may work better in certain locations, but there are so many variables that involve the labour supply, legislation, foreign direct investment and taxation policy, quality of supplier, infrastructure and so on. It’s really a political minefield to draw up direct country comparisons and fruitless to try to pronounce that contact centres work better in – say – South Africa than India.

This morning I had a conversation with JP Rangaswami, the chief information officer (CIO) of BT Global Services, and formerly global CIO of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort – one of the real thought leaders on technology management here in the UK. It was part of my research for a forthcoming Computing project so I don’t want to give away too much of what he said, but he did express some exasperation at the my-country-is-better-than-your-country approach to offshoring. In JP’s world we are moving far away from the client-supplier model of outsourcing to a new collaborative model that is perhaps most easily imagined as something similar to the open source software community.

It’s clear to me that the first legal expert that stops drafting all those soon-forgotten outsourcing contracts and starts working out a better way for clients and suppliers to relate to each other in a way that implies commitment and collaborative freedom simultaneously will make even more money than London lawyers already enjoy.