Why? It seems that offshore outsourcing has over-promised and under-delivered. Most businesses equate offshoring and remote dba management service with low costs, but the reality is that a business must make considerable upfront investments in time and money. And even if a business thoroughly analyzes their money saved, there still remains an amalgam of other difficulties with an offshore operator related to compliance, culture, and political implications.

 

Compliance is one of the immediate deal-breakers in farming out IT projects. Businesses have to look at credit card information, financial services data, the use of offshore data storage and offshore-based services to make sure they meet government and industry regulations. And, after the bureaucratic boundaries are overcome, the cultural barriers pose a different kind of challenge. Often, only companies that invest time in understanding the myriad of cultural factors that impact offshoring arrangements can make the setup work. Consider the differences in employee behavior, communication style, understanding and commitment. These cultural obstacles are only compounded by different time zones.

 

Other aspects to look at are the political implications of your business going offshore.  How will your U.S.-based employees feel about your offshored projects?  More than likely, it will instill doubt, apprehension and discontent. Then, there are the international political instabilities of your offshoring location. If local Internet access goes down for either political or infrastructural reasons, what happens to your communications with the offshore services provider?

 

Lastly, when dealing with offshore remote services providers, there are the usual dangers of viruses, worms and hackers. Lately, we’ve seen a sudden acute concern in foreign and corporate spying. Though the offshore company may be well-intentioned, the state-sponsored espionage works on its own inducements.

 

Taking all these drawbacks into account, it is not a big surprise that the trend from offshoring has shifted towards onshoring. The intolerance of offshore customer service has added to this tendency so much so that companies risk being passed up by customers if they don’t go back onshore. Onshoring is indeed now a competitive differentiator.

 

For businesses that have adequately weighed their savings against the risk, they should still consider cross-training their U.S.-based employees in more advanced IT. That’s one way of addressing a potential sense of purposelessness amongst your internal employees and promoting advances within the IT field. Furthermore, U.S. companies risk being outpaced by contenders in the international IT field if they don’t cultivate homegrown talent. So if you’re not sold on onshoring as a competitive differentiator, at least recognize that the forward-thinking companies will profit from their offshoring without compromising the long-term ingenuity and competitiveness of their internal IT personnel.

 

First Published on Examiner.com.