As reported in News yesterday, Randall S Stephenson, the CEO of US telecoms giant AT&T, caused outrage in the United States by denigrating students there. His comments concerned the problems his company is having sourcing enough workers to fill the 5,000 customer service jobs he promised to return to the US from India.
Only 1,400 of the 5,000 jobs have been sourced from within the US since he made the promise in 2006.
Referring to poorly skilled American school-leavers, he said: "If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down."
"We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he added.
His comments come in the same week as the US Journal of Information Technology Research published a more tactfully worded article entitled Information Systems, Offshore Outsourcing, and Relevancy in the Business School Curriculum by William J. Tastle et al. Nevertheless, it reached the same conclusion. The US education system, suggest the writers, is failing to provide people with the right IT and IS skills for the business marketplace (something UK skills campaigners have been bemoaning for at least a decade).
The article included the comments: "The long-term future for IS education seems bleak at best unless the IS curriculum is reoriented to address these critical issues that are also apparently neglected by some businesses, and our instruction is modified to make IS graduates more appealing and productive to business.
"Outsourcing of IT functions is not a new reality for many organizations in the United States. However, what originated as a domestic approach to business management has increasingly been refocused to explore the cost savings in outsourcing overseas."
While it is hard to consider comments about unskilled America too seriously in the context of the global dominance of such companies as IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, EDS, HP, and dozens of others, they unfortunately coincide with an increasingly isolationist and sometimes xenophobic debate in the US about offshoring. That debate is propelled to some degree by its selective and emotive use as a tick-in-the-box vote grabber by presidential candidates.
Candidates who have raised the issue of US jobs being lost to India and other countries neglect to mention the ways in which outsourcing benefits the US, especially given that the US is itself one of the world's leading providers of outsourced services. It is the world's leading hardware and software developer, and certainly the Moby Dick of intellectual property.
A report this week finds that the US remains the third outsourcing destination of choice for UK CIOs, for example. Many of America's leading IT brands are globally successful partly because they outsource; outsourcing risk is the hidden driver of the US high-tech economy, some commentators believe.
Negative comments about outsourcing appear on numerous blogs. For example, news that Indian giant Tata had acquired iconic British car marques Land Rover and Jaguar (from US car maker Ford, let's not forget) was the trigger for some vitriolic comments on a thread at technocrat.net. This is a site affiliated with Bruce Perens, one of the prime movers of the open source software community and a passionate campaigner for free speech through open source technologies.
Xenophobic responses were swiftly taken down, and in its place remains a fascinating, if bleak insight into the psyche and worldview of some highly vocal sections of the IT community.
What the debate is really about is fear: fear of the decline of US economic power, characterised by the downward spiral of the dollar against other currencies.
The downturn is not the fault of India, China, or any 'emerging economy' – countries that offer vast potential markets and partnership opportunities for Western companies and governments, after all. Gordon Brown has been swift to recognise this fact. Rather, that decline is due in part to an insular political climate combined with the subprime mortgage collapse, and an economy based on the inflation of some companies' worth to investors over what they actually produce for the wider public.
Perhaps some of the most alarmist and xenophobic technology commentators in the blogosphere – who usually hide behind 'Anonymous Coward' postings – might like to consider whether they have become part of the problem, rather than resort to xenophobic slurs on forums that encourage political discourse.
