Take a look at this headline from the Essex Echo last week: “Essex County Council outsourcing scheme could take work abroad”.

The story is about a county council plan to outsource clerical work. It explains: “Council leader Lord Hanningfield held talks with Mumbai-based Tata Group when he visited India last year on a trade mission. At the time, the firm was on a shortlist of companies bidding for the council contracts.”

Though Tata is no longer on the shortlist, the newspaper keeps reminding the reader that “New York-based” IBM is on the list, though it seems that having “Milton Keynes-based T-Systems” on the list is OK. I always thought T-Systems was German? But then again, do you worry about Coca Cola being American when you pick up a drink on hot day?

Anyway, this story highlights several of the major issues about outsourcing from the public sector. The council clearly wants to make its back office more efficient. It probably has decades of entrenched processes to sort out, so a change is long overdue. However, the moment some private sector experts are brought in to have a look at improving things, the balloon goes up. Quite often, outsourcing is going to be the only solution because it is politically impossible to improve service within the existing organisation structure.

Other councillors are going to gain political capital by opposing the scheme and saying it will cost council workers their jobs. Then, the spectre of offshoring is introduced not only by suggesting that public servants might need to “answer to a boss thousands of miles away”, but in the context of the recession and a need to invest locally in Essex.

It feels hard to criticise the local newspaper. They are just reporting the row at the council, but surely the reasons for the outsourcing idea could have been explored further? There must surely have been a study or audit that looks at council performance and suggests that outsourcing would be a solution. And if not, then why not?

The latest news from Hyderabad on the Satyam scandal is that a group of students has now formed a union to try campaigning for their jobs – before they had even started working for Satyam.

The company had been on campus at various universities and formally offered jobs on graduation to hundreds of students. They never received their joining papers because of the present turmoil in the company and now they want the government to take notice and do something for them, by counting their employment as a liability of the firm.

Who thinks they are going to get very far? The polite phrase ‘whistling in the wind’ might be applicable.

Last Friday, I was speaking at an ESRC event focused on career migration at Loughborough University. My talk was focused on connecting the discipline associated with outsourcing and the fluidity of the retained organisation in a globally connected world. I stressed a number of points that extended the reach of outsourcing as a business practice into the realm of P2P (peer to peer) systems, social networks, and the open source movement – with a thread connecting them all and describing how work itself will change because of the way we are engaging socially with other people using the internet.

I was really interested in a lecture by Dr MN Ravishankar (Ravi) from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. Ravi was focused on the discourse of innovation and how valuable that is in career progression – his research was undertaken with Professor Laurie Cohen from Loughborough. In short, if employees pretend they are innovative, excited, and wired, then they do better than those who don’t or those who reject the ‘game’ of pretending that they believe in being innovative. As you can imagine, his research findings were full of humorous observations – people finding that the more often they use the word ‘innovation’ in front of their boss, the faster they get promoted. But there was of course a serious side to it – employees managing to maintain some dual sense of belief in knowing what they need to do to succeed, but not really believing in it.

Though Ravi’s talk was grounded in the academic theories of mimicry he really gave a lot of examples from the coalface of an IT services company in India that were fascinating and demonstrated something that many of us in the industry know all too well – that we use too much jargon and arcane language in the IT and outsourcing world.

I’m sure everyone has tried playing ‘buzzword bingo’ before – the game where you bring a list of clichéd management phrases into a meeting and tick them off as these tired phrases are trotted out by the boss. What was really interesting about Ravi’s research though was that he has studied how and why Indian tech companies try to reduce their sense of “Indian-ness” in the market. How employees in the tech sector mimic clients, copying their accent, dress sense, and jargon in speech, and also how most of these employees think that the idea of them ‘innovating’ when the client is specifying exactly what they should do is fanciful – to say the least.

It’s really interesting stuff, particular the idea of outsourcing supplier staff living in this duality of pretending to be innovative, but knowing that it is impossible.

Last month I wrote a story in this blog about Dr Sugata Mitra and his experiments with slum children in India – inspiration for the award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire. As you might recall, Mitra performed these experiments while he was at the Indian technology firm NIIT - he is now a professor at Newcastle University here in the UK.

Last night, at the private screening room of the Mayfair Hotel in London, NIIT and Pathé Films hosted a private viewing of Slumdog Millionaire, but with a slight difference. Mitra was there in person to talk us through the experiments he performed with the slum kids around India before we got to see the movie. It was funny to hear that Mitra had been to see the movie at a cinema in Newcastle without ever realising that his work had inspired the novel the film is based on!

Mitra’s research focuses on innate learning and I found two of his examples fascinating. He knew kids could teach themselves to use a computer without a manual, but he wanted to see how far this learning-without-guidance paradigm could be stretched so he loaded up a computer with information on biotechnology, all written in English, and left it with a bunch of Tamil-speaking kids for a couple of months.

The end result, these kids could talk to him about DNA, cell structures and other complex matters of biotechnology that they should not even be aware of, given their environment. Mitra has tried some similar experiments closer to home here in the UK. He has proved that eight-to-10-year-old, primary age kids, can easily handle GCSE-level exam questions designed for 16-year olds, providing the teacher guides the children using similar methods to his original slum experiments. That is, let the children find the answers using the internet and make them work in small groups that encourage peer co-operation – and some peer pressure, or a desire to do better and know more than the other kids.

It was a fascinating talk by Dr Mitra and a great opener for a great movie. Kudos has to go to the NIIT team for arranging this. I wonder if they arranged it because they saw my earlier blog?

Reverse offshoring - who would have thought that this would ever happen? IBM has created Project Match to match up people the company lays off in one country with vacant positions in another. Typically this means that higher-priced US workers are offered a job in a location such as India, China, or Brazil.

At first sight it looks like a reverse offshoring arrangement – IBM is just shifting existing talent around the world to where it is needed. But this is not a multinational company sending ex-pats around the world with fat packages; they are offering local positions on local terms.

However, is this as bad as it might sound? Would it be more responsible for IBM to just make people redundant in one region and to not offer them a position in the same company, in a region that is hiring? And if you factor in that these are exciting developing markets with high growth and great opportunities for learning, maybe it’s not such a bad deal?

After all, an IBM-staffer who returns to the US after a stint in India or China is going to be a lot more employable than most other techies hawking their CV to potential employers. Global experience counts for a lot in this industry today.

I was recently scanning through the Offshore Futures report by consultancy Alsbridge. It was published about a month ago, and I saw I had been quoted in there, but given that I have lunch with the author on Friday I thought I should give it a closer inspection.

One thing that jumped out at me relates to human resources. Many in the industry have argued for a long time that partnering with companies demands a different skill set to procurement and purchasing. For long-term outsourcing to work, suppliers need to be included within the supply chain – and therefore to share in the success when the operation is working well.

The author of the report, Paul Morrison, states: “Outsourcing specialists would be a career evolution for procurement professionals, technical specialists and industry experts. A successful function is multi-disciplinary. A big core will come from IT and procurement because they are natural starting points.”

I agree with Paul, but I have not seen a lot of firms really specify this kind of multi-discipline approach in their hiring – it’s just the same old “have you got some experience of outsourcing?” I’d be interested to see just how this develops over the next few years. Perhaps those of us with a good combination of technical, industry, and communication skills might have a bright future after all?

Among the charges often levelled against trade unions is they are combative, antagonistic, and their existence creates a “them and us” culture that shouldn’t exist in an era of flat management structures.

So, I was interested to see an email from the BPO Union about their proposals in India. The organisation seems to be pre-empting measures the Indian government might offer to help the local outsourcing industry and IT service companies ride out this uncertain recessionary period. The suggestion is that staff across the industry would take a pay cut of 10-15 per cent if the reduction were directly subsidised by the government. Instead of government coffers being emptied directly into private companies, the union is suggesting that employees should be protected just as much as the companies – and this idea of a hypothecated subsidy sounds, on the surface, like a reasonable suggestion.

My only uncertainty about this kind of bailout plan among the Indian service firms is that some of them stand to gain from economic slowdown elsewhere, so it’s not a universal problem. Tata Consultancy Services was recently quoted in the FT saying it is now actively reducing its dependence on the US as a source of business – can you imagine that statement from an Indian IT supplier just a few years back? Companies in the same sector, such as Cognizant, have been posting increasing revenue and many are quite bullish about the year ahead because of the amount of hunkering down that needs to be done if companies are really going to cut costs and survive.

Services are still required by companies in all sectors, but areas of business that have strongly supported outsourcing – such as banking and financial services – remain in a state of flux.

The National Outsourcing Association (NOA) here in the UK has just launched a new series of qualifications in outsourcing. It’s an attempt to ensure there is a best practice benchmark for outsourcing knowledge in the industry. So companies should be able to use the courses as a part of their own training programmes, and individuals can use the courses to boost their own CV when trying to get a job in the industry.

The NOA has created a new arm called NOA Pathway to administrate the courses and they are all accredited by Middlesex University. There are a number of qualifications, beginning with the most basic foundation knowledge of outsourcing, called the NOA Gateway. The NOA Professional Certificate is equivalent to the first year of a degree course, and the NOA Advanced Professional Certificate is equivalent to the third year of a degree. The NOA Diploma is the gold standard, being classed as equivalent to a master’s degree.

There have been some other attempts creating outsourcing certification, but this is the first time a comprehensive suite of university-accredited qualifications ranging from a foundation course to a master’s degree has been offered all as a single package. I am on the inside as a director of the NOA, so I know how much work has gone into bringing this to the market. Yvonne Williams, the NOA Professional Training Director, has worked for the past couple of years to get this programme looking so good.

Take a look at the NOA website for more information on the NOA Pathway and enjoy your studies!

All is well. President Barack Obama is now going to reward his kids with a new puppy for their support. I want to know if that means we are going to be treated to a new series of dog cams, in the same spirit as the “Barney cam” videos produced by President Bush. Perhaps the instigation of this video series was his finest moment in the White House? I don’t need to be impartial here. The sooner Bush is on the conference circuit earning big bucks for speeches about fireside chats with Tony, the better.

But what everyone around the world wants to know is how far President Obama will go towards fulfilling his campaign pledge to restrict offshore outsourcing. He promised a restriction on outsourcing, but was it just electioneering or a serious threat to all those suppliers in India, the Philippines, China and other fast-developing regions?

It’s obviously difficult to rein in international business. What can President Obama do to prevent Microsoft developing software all over the world, including in hi-tech Indian delivery centres? And, when Microsoft argues that this global development actually results in the healthy operation of a US company, can he seriously tell the corporation to retrench and retreat to behind the US border? Then, once Steve Ballmer is dealt with, how about the thousands of other American companies that operate globally?

Nasscom, the software and services trade association in India, is playing down the threat. They believe that Obama will focus more on the domestic economy and the creation of jobs at home, rather than shutting off links to overseas locations. Of course, Nasscom might be expected to play down the danger, but its member companies are continuing to see healthy double-digit revenue growth in a business environment where many company executives are only considering which ledge to leap off.

I don’t think Obama will threaten the offshore outsourcing industry, but not because he is not going to fulfil his pledge. I think he will examine the legal and tax framework around service transfers, but I think it is a long way down the agenda and not something that will even be reviewed for a couple of years.

Don’t forget, he made an even bigger pledge to pull US troops out of Iraq. These big-ticket foreign policy pledges and the crashing economy are far more pressing than the effect of offshoring on US jobs – which is actual terms is tiny compared to the effect of economic uncertainty on jobs.

But who knows what he will pull out of the hat in the New Year? Let’s enjoy the festive season and hope that the new US president ushers in a new confidence for 2009. Or in Star Wars parlance, a New Hope.

It's now a couple of days since journalist Soumya Vishwanathan was murdered in Delhi. Most comments seem to be focused on the fact that she was a woman, out alone late at night - it was something like 3am. Delhi's chief minister Sheila Dixit - another working woman - said that for a woman to be out in the city at 3am is "adventurous".

People are calling out for rules and regulations to protect women in big cities at unsocial hours - not just when returning from parties, but those forced by their employer to work unsocial hours and return home late at night. In the southern state Karnataka, home to hi-tech Bangalore, there are rules in place that determine when a company is under an obligation to get women home safely. Clearly this is a major issue in the business process outsourcing sector, where armies of workers are forced to work nights to service clients in Europe and the US.

I have a couple of observations on this. First, the rules designed to protect women don’t necessarily work. A company might pay for a taxi, but who screens the background of the driver? Second, if it is dangerous for women to be travelling home late at night then surely it is also dangerous for men?

I would also add that things are no better here in the UK. I have a friend who works in a London nightclub and she regularly finishes work at 4am. I asked her recently if the club gets her home safely, assuming they provide a taxi. She laughed and told me that none of the London clubs she has worked in provide transport for staff. Waitresses and bar staff are turfed out into the street at 4am and expected to get home – more than an hour before the London Underground starts running.

I’m sure that companies used to look after their staff better than this. If I was personally running a business that required staff to cross a major city to get home at an hour when public transport is very limited then I’d think it’s immoral to just hope for the best.