Musings on Offshore Resources, people and individuals?
I was at a client meeting a few days ago when the onsite manager said something like “our offshore architect” is helping with the design. To that, the client’s manager, Bob, quipped “we all refer to each other by name here. What about your offshore architect; what’s his name?”
Interestingly, Henry Jenkins makes exactly the same comment on my blog post too.
Agreed, the mindset among some managers is to refer to people allocated to their projects as “resources” …needless to say, they too are “resources” in the eyes of their managers and so it goes up the chain-of-command.
Now, one could argue that this is not just an “offshoring” issue but an “IT services” organization culture, and probably has its origin to the time before software services took off in the industry. Students of Management, and MBA courses are taught about the “basics of business” in terms of the building blocks used : land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship. Business graduates start assuming that they are the “entrepreneurs” and that everything (everyone) else at their disposal is a “resource” …
Well, another argument here is the term “resource” stems from “human resources” …and yes, most organizations do focus on their “human resources” …
Whatever the argument, I would tend to agree with Henry and not Shakespeare …
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” But no, calling Mohan just “The Onsite Guy” or Shyam “the offshore resource” would not cut it. Right?
Comments
Mohan,
Your post underlines the hard reality that in offshore relationship, the "human resource" tend to loose out on his individuality and is taken as a black box which takes some input and produces a profitable cost efficient output.
I do not blame the organization or the person who uses the term "resource". It is more due to improper interation of the so called "offshore resource" with the client. This should get solved to a great extent as IT outsourcing moves up the value chain and the "thought" of the person becomes more (or at least equally) important than his "work".
Another reason for this is the pseudo name concept adopted by several IT outsourcing companies. They will change 'Dinesh' to 'Dany'. A person on the other side of the world understands this very well and he possibly takes a clue that the identity is not that important.
Just my odd random thought :)
Abhishek
Posted by: Abhishek Rungta | January 13, 2007 08:39 AM