Is India The Only Option For Offsite IT Services?
IT Drivers in today’s shifting market place include the need to offshore. Reducing costs, increasing productivity and decreasing time to market are all Strategic objectives of many IT departments. A google search will quickly point to what many companies are turning to, to address these objectives: Outsourcing/Offshoring to India.
US and European blue chip companies have taken this approach with mixed results. There are well documented pros and cons with offshoring, listed many times in countless other articles. To summarise these include language barriers, inflexible requirement standards, time zone differences, culture clashes and management style.
South African companies have faced their own challenges when it comes to the great Outsourcing experiment. Large corporates here have even awarded large, multi-year, water-tight contracts to these organizations all based on very slick sales pitches, only to find out a year down the line the reality doesn’t always live-up to the fancy brochures. Simpler, Better, Faster – it most certainly wasn’t.
What Alternatives Are There For The South African IT Decision Makers?
We first need to address a few misconceptions regarding South African skills:
- “Our laws are pro labour”.
- “South Africans don’t work hard.”
- “South Africans are job hoppers.”
- “South Africans are expensive.”
All of the above may be true to differing degrees and apply to the traditional approach of hiring people through an employment agency and giving the person a desk and computer within your IT department.
Where STS (A Proudly South African Technology Company) is getting it right is removing the management and labor intensive components from the equation. Divorcing the Labour and Management from the Execution and Delivery.
To put it simply, you provide the Challenge, STS provides the Solution.
