For several years offshoring has been a sensible solution. Advanced skill sets, low labour costs, and readily available capacity in the major IT offshoring hubs, has meant that there’s been a consistent high-availability solution to many for most IT infrastructure and development needs. Yet, rising labour costs, skills shortages and the long-tail effects of the pandemic might be set to change that.
IT organizations have always been more open to offshoring. It took off in the early 2000s, business was booming, the world was becoming a global village, and it was all making sense. Highly skilled pools of resources sat in locations with typically low operating costs, and economic development policies incentivized organizations to bring their business there.
An exponential increase in how organizations consumed IT products and resources, far more reliable global interconnection options, and a rapid move towards cloud meant that skilled teams sitting abroad provided a robust solution to most organizations’ IT needs. Plus, it was an excellent way to keep costs low and maximize revenue.
But recent changes in the landscape are eroding at the gains many used to enjoy.
Global Economic Shifts
Economic activity in the offshoring hubs has grown and the forces of supply and demand have raised the standard of living in these economies. But with this comes a rising cost of living, freer paths to migration, and a highly competitive talent pool, in some instances.
Demand for IT professionals in India has grown more than 400% according to the job-search portal Indeed. The market’s demands have outstripped the supply of India’s 4.5 million-strong IT professionals. It’s driving up salary expectations ‑ more than 120% ‑ and eroding some of the cost efficiencies offshoring previously enjoyed.
Historically, offshoring was a means of cutting or reducing costs whilst achieving the same, if not better levels of service and best practice, but now other considerations need to be made when costs start drawing parallels those in-house.
And then, due to COVID, a lingering stain of resource availability.
These factors are not surprising; they are indicators that the offshoring model is working and have elevated many thousands of people into positive new lifestyles. The IT boom meant that highly skilled resources were often employed to perform repetitive tasks but at better salaries than could be achieved within other professions. However, was this highly skilled workforce of coders, developers, programmers and testers was being put to the best use or whether there was a better option while re-allocating important but systematic tasks?
An increasingly popular option to this levelling up challenge is automation.
When To Automate?
Where specialist skills are not required, a “machine” is far more adept at completing complex routine tasks, reducing costs and freeing up time for highly skilled resources to focus on more valuable and higher margin work. In our space, that would equate to working on projects such as digital transformation or other proactive efforts.
Within the end-user computing arena, IT Transformation projects such as Windows 11, cloud virtualization or hardware refresh that rely on a suite of repeatable workplace and application management products, can benefit a great deal from automation in the form of reduced risk and cost. At Juriba, we enable this benefit through a suite of management products that not only interact to trigger repeatable tasks, but provide greater levels of comfort and efficiency, too.
We provide the leading Workplace Automation platform, which turns the chaos and frustration caused by today's complex and constantly changing IT environments into efficient, strategic evergreen IT and digital transformation projects.
The Benefits of Automation
Automation allows you to quickly establish robotic workflows with minimal effort, presented in our easy-to-understand interface. Whether you’re a service integrator running your customer’s digital workspace or managing your end-user workspace, you can reduce the challenges and risks associated with enterprize migration and ongoing IT processes and drive faster and more accurate service delivery.
Automation has proven itself time and again.
That is not to say the offshoring is facing an existential threat by any means, but it is moving into a space where it is fit for purpose and needs to differentiate the value. For everything else, there’s automation.
Certain organizations ‑ whether due to size scale or revenue ‑ will still benefit from offshoring operations, and those outsourcers that already have advanced skills in-house and who require “hands” to execute will benefit far more from automating several processes and tasks at a greatly reduced overall cost, driving higher margin and a more predictable service.
Offshoring will continue to shift as new technologies emerge. As it does, smart service integrators and in-house IT departments will leverage automation more and more, providing greater growth opportunities for the resources that mean the most to them, their people.