Businesses begin "Backshoring" according to a recent infoworld article
Mar
5
Written by:
Sunday, March 05, 2006 2:22 PM
A number of businesses who did software development overseas are finding that bringing the development process back home has yielded better software and more productive programmers...
According to a recent infoworld article some companies have begun "backshoring" - that is bringing the software development process back closer to home. Either to local development companies or in-house. The fact according to one CEO is that for every 4-5 overseas developer you need one in-house person to manage that group, to see any reasonable productivity from them. When you compare that to one manager working with up to 10 developers stateside it creates a very top-heavy management structure.
In addition, the article found that taking development overseas should really only occur if the company is large enough to open offices overseas and make the local programmers employees. By putting those development responsibilities oversease the technology company referenced in the artical was "putting their intellectual assets at risk" without any corresponding assurance that they would be safe and secure.
Finally there was the factor of the disconnect between architecture and design. The company found that the software architecture and design worked best when they were tightly coupled. Placing the architecture overseas and the design in-house disconnected those processes - and resulted in more poorly designed sofware.
The article concluded by noting that as India has gotten on their feet financially it has driven the price of developers up and larger software development companies such as SAP are pulling out of India and going to even cheaper locations such as China and Eastern Europe.
I hope someone is thanking the computer industry for helping to industrialize poor and struggling countries across the world. And I hope that as outsource options are considered that people look at the big picture and consider working with a company such as OS-Cubed that considers the entire product - design, architecture, installation, support and training part of their overall mission.