Taking your gear to Madagascar? Why? To save a few bucks on the guys who tend it? Frank, you don't get this perspective anywhere but in FCTF Forum!
CIO's -this creation of the PC assault in the office- are under pressure to cut costs. CIO's have had it good during the build up of the PC assault, money was no objection and the tech bubble was a bonanza.
Today the understanding on the PC assault on the office is much better. There is visibility, both, on its benefits and the associated costs and the costs must be cut. As they have been in the past years.
Any HQ of any company puts pressure elsewhere for them to survive and the cuts always have to be done elsewhere for them to live comfortable. Unluckily, I was always in the receiving end and was only a couple of years on Ericsson HQ. In fact I went there with the purpose of learning how an HQ worked.
CIO ported the applications and the call centers to India and Eastern Europe and lived to fight another day. You need to be an India, Filipino, former communist, Indonesian, Thai or Brazilian to believe engineers will make decent money in engineering! :-)
In the US, judging by what I read, there aren't many young people going into this profession because they know since the Cold War is gone, the field is open to competition from abroad and there is no more gravy train of defense contracts.
CIO, seeing this constant flow of cheap engineering resources, may be persuaded to send their gear out there and cut HQ costs and live a few years more comfortable.
They find a place with new engineers entering the workforce every year. Bring in a good director of operations. Rent a bunker. Build in the gear. Seek cheap transmission and port the whole think into it.
The solution is more likely to be feasible as nearshoring rather than offshoring: say Germany outsourcing the gear to Hungary, Czech Republic or Slovakia. Is closer. The telecoms are operated as business and are no longer state-owned enterprises. No language barriers and the perception (it is all about perceptions) that the electric grid is not blackout prone.
Slowly, as the engineers of Eastern Europe get costlier and rare - which is already happening- the sites for outsourcing have to be sought further afield.
But what are the options to this outsourcing? And there are always options. Why are no one thinking about the options? |
