Outsourcing?

In the past few years, people speak so much about outsourcing and offshoring, write so many books about it that it has somehow become a bit cliché to speak about it when you are talking business. Anyone who is interested in business generally will speak about it as the latest business fad, even if it is there for a while, and even if we are not aware of it, it is a part of our daily global lives, and almost each supply chain we use.

About a year ago, I remember I had a laugh when I watched "Call Center". A short film that full of irony, tells the story of how call centers from multinationals move to India to serve callers from all over the world. And still after I read "The World is Flat" I was not able to notoriouously identify how outsourcing was having a direct impact in my life even if I knew it was having it regardless of me noticing or not. I was not able to see it, because I was never calling any help desk, and the closest thing I had to call an IT helpdesk and being helped by an indian, was screaming to Abhishek across the AI office when the internet wasn't working, and as Abhi was anyways with us, he was an internal IT technician, and we were not outsourcing anything. He would simply go mad with all our requests.

And lately, I had outsourcing in my face. Now it is alive, and it is not because a huge company we all knows lives in our computers outsources several processes to Accenture in Ireland, being a quite important client, but because without really knowing it, I called India.

It is early in the morning, and I need to check several things online, but every single time I use Explorer the computer freezes (I don't like Explorer, but Mozilla doesn't work in my Accenture laptop). I restart the computer, same thing. Open and close things. Same thing. I am sooo losing my patience, and I think of simply reinstalling the thing, but I cannot do it, because obviously with such a problem I could not download anything either, so I go to the IT department desperate, in hope to find a substitute to sweet Abhishek or the cool Gee. The IT people have their own glass box, where no one from our open space should disturb them. They are surrounded with computers and laptops all over the place. To get in, you have to knock, and they will open. No one can simply open the door. And so, when the girl inside saw me in desperation she opened the door.

I gave her my laptop and told her all the story. She was about to check it out, when she asked "Have you called CIO?". I answered honestly that I hadn't because I had a software problem that couldn't be solved by someone telling me how to click some menus in my computer, like guiding me to activate cookies or something, but that I really honestly thought I needed to reinstall. "Call CIO" she told coldly, as she handed me a paper with an extension number. I be to myself I'd be back in five minutes, when the person on the phone would say he/she couldn't help me and I would have to pay the IT people a visit in their box.

So I dial. A man in a british accent picks up. After a few minutes I realize he is actually a camouflaged indian accent. And for a remark at the greeting I realize he actually is in India. He asks me a few questions, and gives me few instructions that I follow before what I expected would be an order to go to the IT girl again, but instead, my computer started doing things on its own, or well... the dude was doing stuff in my computer remotely asking me to insert passwords here and there when it was necessary. I have no idea of how it happened, but after a 40 minutes call my computer was up and running, and that is what I call outsourcing.