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Mumbai Bombings Give Outsourcing Community Pause
theodp writes "eWeek reports that the big fear of offshore outsourcing customers has become a reality: a major bombing attack in an outsourcing hub. In the wake of the attack, companies are considering their resources and preparedness. Despite understandable fears, people on the ground don't seem to think these latest attacks will have a long-term effect on the growth of India's tech sector." From the article: "The terrorist attack in Mumbai--and conflict between Israel and Lebanon for that matter--raise a series of questions for companies sourcing technology globally. Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers? "
I know /.ers aren't too pleased with all this outsourcing, but isn't this reaction a bit extreme?
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Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.
How is outsourcing any different from sub contracting within your own country in this respect? Quoth the article:
Quite.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
Why do we always outsource to places that are stuck in eternal struggles. Seriously, when was the last time Iceland or New Zeland had some terrorist plot or civil war ensue.
Three considerations, IMO, outweigh the rest:
* Telecom infrastructure
* Work process
* Geographical diversification
You need reliable telecom infrastructure for obvious reasons. You need good work processes for backup and the like, but even more so that if you lose the people on a project, somebody else can step in and at least understand what needs to be done. And you need geographical diversification so that, if worst comes to worst, there IS somebody else to step in.
To the extent you have those three, outsourcing or otherwise doing business in unstable places can be a smart risk to take. If not, you can be very badly exposed.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?
That's seems about on a par with worrying about doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald because they had an office located in the World Trade Center.
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
For your information, no.
Punjab did have a violent separatist movement in the 1980s. That's history now. There's far more separatist violence in Corsica or the Basque country. Or Quebec.
All major American, and certain European cities are under the threat of bombs, and not just normal bombs at that. You have the first world luxury of choosing from biological, chemical, nuclear and neurotic weapons. So why don't people speak about the threat to all technological and commercial sourcing?
/.? Are you all softbellies scared of getting outsourced?
So why the fuck is the bombing in Mumbai so important to
Mark me flamebait, lazy overpaid supremacist!
-clueless
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
Come of folks. So the world's largest democratic country with the world's largest population of English speaking citizens has one city bombed and the US is going to rethink its direction to outsource technology workers there? Nope!
In fact, many of the export centers are not in the city center and were unaffected by this event. Knowing many Indians, those that were will be back up and running in no time flat no matter what it takes.
Now, there may be reasons to rethink outsourcing such as low productivity, higher costs, poor quality of work, and customer relation issues but this is not one of them.
The best wishes of many people in the US go out to every Indian and we stand in solidarity with the many many millions of peace loving, free citizens of that nation.
My first reaction to this was "I wonder how this will affect IT outsourcing?"
My second reaction was shame that that should be my first reaction, when I have friends and colleagues with family there.
Personally, I don't think this should have a practical impact on outsourcing decisions. India is a stable democracy; war may stir ethnic and religious resentment, but I don't see things changing overnight in a way that affects business. And even at intolerable levels, terrorist attacks have almost no actuarial significance.
On the other hand, China is frightening. It's not longer precisely accurate to call it a totalitarian state, but politically it is still a one party, non-democratic state. Mature democracies have a kind of dynamic stability, where individuals and parties change, but politics and policy don't shift that dramatically. Systems based on the authority of a single group may be superficially stable, but they are vulnerable to individuals or groups of individuals being replaced, or even just changing their minds. Put the nation under stress, and you could well have an ultra-ideological hard liner becoming supreme leader.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers?
yeah ! Let's make a back up of our chief engineer's brain, just in case he gets blown to pieces, you insensitive clod!
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Many people died in New Orleans, too, when Katrina blew and washed through. Guess what? Companies are moving data centers away from there, too. Is that wrong?
Plug in "hurricanes" instead of "bombs" for where you said "future events," and you'll get the picture, i.e., "that seems on par with worrying about doing business with a data center company because their center is located in a low-lying coastal area."
It's standard disaster planning to look at evolving environmental and political conditions and plan ahead. You may not like to think about it, but it's not any more callous than insurance companies making actuarial tables. The real point to take away isn't "don't do business with country X," but "don't put all your data or resources in one geographical location." And keep apprised of what is going on in the locations where you are operating. That's common sense, Dan.
Get off my launchpad!
Yea... I am from India and this is the worst kind of FUD I have seen. Terrorist attacks form a much smaller risk then fire, floods and other hazards. A city capable of dealing with those can pretty much handle any such terrorist emergencies. This article is pure FUD.
The thing is that no company is going to move out of India because of this. The labour is still so cheap in comparison that they can afford the loss of machinery and, as cynical as it sounds, training new employees to fill the empty slots still costs less than constantly paying first world wages. The gains outweigh the risks on this.
Having looked at the posts, I feel everyone has concentrated on the terrorism risks of outsourcing. But for me the far more important risks when shifting work overseas are those that are non-political.
For instance, if you are moving your call centre overseas (albeit you would probably be the last company to do so). Can you trust that the telecom downtime will be negligable?
Or for any type of business. Is the local power supply reliable?
Both of the above examples are not simgle massive event but constant issues and be massively damaging to mantaining custom.
IMHO those are the types of concern that outsourcers should be taking into account when moving abroad.
Having said that I imagine that labour is pretty cheap in the Gaza Strip right now, but I dont think many companies will be moving in at the moment.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
But wait: One in 2,600,000 Americans die each and every day in automobile accidents! That can only mean we need to prepare for Armageddon!
Yeah, and I think some of the people out there un-learned it during the studies for their MBA degree.
No, I don't think that an MBA is imnical to things or that it's the root cause of all of this- hell,
I'm getting an MBA first and then going back to finish my MSCS because of what I'm ending up doing
in my life these days. But I do think that there's a lot of goings on that just run counter to
sustainability that are going on that are very similar to the 1920's- disturbingly so. We've got a
bunch of people doing whatever it takes to ensure stock valuations stay high, solely for the benefit
of the "shareholders", never once thinking about what the value is going to be to them in one year's
timeframe. Never once thinking about the valuation being more of an ephemeral thing, meaning the
sale price of the stock and that it's not the quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even the daily valuation
that you need to concern yourself with. If you're doing that, you're not worrying about the valuation
of the company for the shareholders, because you're catering to the people that are selling
your stock or short-selling it to make a profit- basically manipulating things or gambling on things
so that they'll be richer. It doesn't actually HELP the shareholders when you do that- especially
if you're selling off the future to get the current valuation. Many of the companies out there
are doing this, helping improve the value of company for the share-sellers, not worrying about keeping
the company afloat and doing well.
I just hope we have enough regulations, etc. in place to prevent another Black Monday. We're heading
for it otherwise if we don't adjust some of our business practices with respect to the stock market- and
I just don't see this mess changing until several more millions of people are impacted by another Enron,
Tyco, or WorldCom. And with no care or concern of the consequences of their actions save the bottom line
in the short term it's just going to keep happening and happening time and and time again.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Your attempt at irony is in extremely poor taste, even for a Slashdot nerd.
The peoples of London, Madrid and New York were murdered at random by monsters who came to those places from distant lands where it is common to settle minor disputes by horrific acts of violence. The peoples of London, Madrid, and New York had learned from their history the futility of attempting to settle disputes through mass murder. They developed civilized methods of conflict resolution like fair court systems. They restrained themselves from mass murder in ways that are completely unknown to the subhumans who came to these cities from the disfunctional lands with the intention of genocidal slaughter.
The resulting actions after suffering horrible murder by the citizens of London, Madrid, and New York against the peoples who come from disfunctional cultures are not racist or discriminatory, but reasonable and rational acts of self-defense from the people who come to their cities with the intent of murder. It is sad that the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples who came to the great cities of civilization in order to escape from the madness of disfuctional societies suffer in the West due to the actions of monsters.
But, it is the responsibility of the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples from the disfuctional lands to seperate the monsters from their own society when they arrive in the civilized world. If the civilized people of a foreign culture can not or will not isolate and neutralize the monsters who live in their community, then they all will bear responsibility for the crimes that these monsters commit against the rest of the citizens. The entire community will suffer. That is the way that the world works.
The citizens of the cities that have suffered from the crimes that subhumans commit are not responsible for their inability to tell monsters from civilized people among those have come to their cities from distant lands.
is poor, desparate men and women with nothing to lose. Take someone, give them a job, a family and a future and see how eager they are to plant bombs on trains. That said, in 20 years when America's job market is flooded with 30 million+ (now legal) immigrants working for $5.15/hr, india and china's industrialization has drivin gas up to $10/gallon and a loaf of bread is $5-$10 dollars, expect to see random bombings and shootings here too.
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Just another example of the high costs- physical, economic, psychic- of having a large Muslim population in your midst. Israel suffers from it for dispossesing the Palestinian people- mainly the Muslim flotsam and jetsam of imperial Turkey, resettled in Judea from Egypt, Circassia, and the Balkans during the Ottoman Empire's slow-motion collapse. Yet what of India, the victim of 1400 years of continual jihad aggression during which millions of Hindus were slaughtered or enslaved, tens of thousands of temples and monuments destroyed, and in the modern age two large sections of it carved out to make homelands for its invaders? Yet what did it do to deserve this enemy from without (Pakistan and to a lesser extent Bangladesh) and within (150 million Indian Muslim "citizens") besides succumbing in the end to continuous jihad aggression? And why are Western countries voluntarily replicating the same conditions for themselves by allowing millions of Third World Muslim colonist-invaders into their midsts?
Putting aside emotional reactions which would cause me to make comments like: "people are dying and yet you are thinking about IT infrastructures"... (I am an Indian, and have lots of relatives and friends in Mumbai). I know that life went on after the blasts. I know that the big IT companies in India are world leaders when it comes to having processes and procedures concerning their business. (I am in the IT industry myself). In my experience, most of the clients that I have worked with have had little or no processes themselves. So, it is unfair to think of this in a light where India (the country being out-sourced to) needs to have back-up plans, and disaster recovery procedures. Anyway, I think that the whole world is fair game for terrorist activities (terrorists being what they are), so we should be discussing about these procedures, plans, etc. at a global level. - Vaibhav
>Any country ruled by an arrogant kleptocracy that promotes exporting it's people to bring back money is a failing country, just like Mexico.
I agree - I thought the same thing when I saw the USA exporting troops to Iraq, for the same reasons...
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you