Outsourcing to India and Andhra - Analysis

The purpose of writing this article is to make an attempt to analyze recent social phenomena, ever increasing outsourcing of amercan coroprate jobs to India in general and to the telugu land in particular. Is there any reason for this dynamics other than the availability of inexpensive, abundant and job-starved labor in India? I tried to get more insights into this phenomenon.

Following questions and arguments form the context to my analysis....

How Hyderabad, a city long known for religious antagonism, has been transformed into a favorable destination for American Hi-tech companies? How could India (in specific Andhra) with minimal primary and secondary education facilities and dismal public school system produced such highly talented software engineers who can compete and excel in these innovative skills. How come work is flowing from America to India like water flows along the slope? Is it becuase of Indian's inherent knowledge culture? Is it because of reliable social traditions? Is it becuase of relentless struggle for existence? Or is it natural instinct of our people? Why couldn't America do the replica of what we have done in India ;In spite of high technological advantagem Why can't America create a class of in-expensive labor who can manufacture at less rates and who can write software at much lower rates than Indians do? To me this is really not a paradox.. I tried to analyze the success of Indians (specifically Telugus) from the following perspectives...

Availability and nurturing of skills
Recently our company was looking for people who has skills in printing automation using Adobe Indesign, which is a rare skill in it self and on top of that we would like to automate the process by integrating printing systems with already existing web based catalog systems.. When we searched for these skills sixty percent of the companies who responded to our RFP are Indian based. The strength of these companies is not only in writing highly reliable software at a cost that is about half of what their American counterparts charge but also in adjusting themselves to the deadline pressures and budgetary constraints. In fact, the Indian company we hired produced catalogs manually in record time. So these Indian companies could provide valuable contributions to both our long term objectives like automation and innovation also meet our short term objectives such as producing catalog manually. So, they really become partners in our company's dynamic changing needs. This is possible only because these companies can maintain, nurture and build skills for any volume and type of client's demands.

I often come across Indian consultants when I look for people with rare technical skills;be it Enterprise Service Bus, .NET. Adobe.....This is totally amazing.. I think the day is not far when we see flood of software products flowing from India into American markets.. I recently came across an article where it is mentioned that the big companies like SAP and oracle are actually worried about their future as companies like TCS and Infosys can make a similar suit of ERP products at much cheaper prices. After all, there are lot of unsung talented Indian people behind these well known products development.

Knowledge and intellectual culture
We Indians want to learn, acquire knowledge, use our intellect, make logical comparisons, draw conclusions, make inferences, bring out fallacies, relate to principles, think abstractions and be content with our individual findings. I am not saying this is unique to Indian people alone..but this is the foremost quality of people from lot of Eastern countries. Sun raises in the east!! These unique habits form core of our culture.. We do have lot of limitations in our culture but the purpose of this article is not bringing those. I will discuss those drawbacks at later point of time. If you want to check your self, go and search in Google Trends for java. Most of the people searching for java are from India;in fact, top 7 cities are from India.


Match of mindsets and attitudes..
As discussed, we Indians are knowledge oriented; Americans are service and business oriented.. We manifest knowledge;Americans manifest interpersonal skills. We lead and excel in not only in technologies but also in projects, risk mitigation's, commitment and sincerity. Americans are communicative, business savvy and innovative. We complement each other well.. If outsourcing stops, we both loose. Loose..Loose is the last resort in relationships.. We both win because of the inter-personal chemistry...

Social composition
Social stereo types in India are real and will not go away that easily.. Our society is divided into groups and subgroups by caste system and there is bitterness among the castes and this type of animosity between groups is there even in West.. Lot of European nationals were antagonistic to each other in America few decades back.. You can even see these narrow minded stereo types in American society also.. But, in India we compliment these differences and we could able to maintain the social structure for thousands of years and I am sure we are going to maintain this cohesion for hundreds of years to come at least.

I think software development as a social process apart from technical process..Team needs to exchange ideas, communicate opinions and interchange thought processes... Synergy is importany factor here.. Synergy is possible only when there is strong social dynamics. Indian society even today is socially cohesive and dynamic unlike in American society where people are more individualistic and conservative when it comes to social relations. The inherent tolerance and social dynamics are most important factors in achieving consistency, predictability and reliability in delivery of projects..

Cost of labor and Growing unemployment (that actually influences the cost of labor) are other reasons we attribute for offshore outsourcing..But in the absence of above discussed factors, we don't even make an attempt to calculate the savings and cost be comes irrelevant.. So cheap labor is not a solution unless it is complemented by quality of products..

So, American corporate cannot afford to loose this valuable and well developed and talented human resource pool.. I cannot imagine how many more years and how many billions of dollars that these American corporations have to spend to develop this kind of knowledgeable, intellectual, hardworking and reliable human resource pool. Nor can I imagine how many more years it will take for India to catch up with America to create a world class infrastructure that is second to none....

America needs India to maintain it's infrastructures, corporate structures and sustain materialistic progress.. India needs America to satiate it's social and personal needs, maintain it's social and spiritual framework.

We all know water never stops flowing down so does the outsourcing to India ....