Meanwhile, a cottage industry has sprung up to facilitate foreign partnerships and operations, which rely heavily on U.S.-based
high-tech workers with strong managerial skills. A few of the powerhouse consultancies include Alsbridge, Everest Group, EquaTerra,
Ness Technologies, and TBI. “We have tremendous demand and we can’t hire fast enough,” says Alsbridge CEO Ben Trowbridge,
who plans to double his workforce in the next three months.
The qualifications? Successful candidates will be adept at managing programs; they also must be able to deal with complex,
business-intimate questions and they have to have been part of a process that has included outsourcing and offshoring activities.
“If going to work for an outsourcing facilitator sounds like aiding and abetting the enemy,” Alsbridge says, “IT workers are
competing with the labor pool not the outsource providers.”
Rankin says the army of contractors willing to work on a project-to-project basis is growing. He points to shifts in the temporary-IT-staffing
business, which regularly conducts online auctions to provide labor. Those contractors have to be managed. For now, the trend
toward IT services as a commodity shows no signs of slowing down.
Adapting to Change
Many executives see the flux within the IT sector as déjà vu when viewed in the historic context of America’s transition from
agriculture to manufacturing to services and product design.
“Transitions are difficult but resistance is harder,” says Saman Amarasinghe, CTO of Determina, a security solutions provider,
and associate professor at MIT. “We’ve been through this numerous times in the past, whether it’s automobiles or textiles,
and so on. And every time we thought we were losing the crown jewels, but we didn’t.”
Mark Lewis, executive vice president of EMC Software, says “any time an industry goes through globalization, and they all
will eventually, a shift in roles takes place.” He notes that whereas an IT manager’s team was likely to consist of 10 workers
in a cube farm, today it’s more likely to be 100 workers dispersed throughout multiple countries.
The flight of midlevel IT jobs, and increased competition for what’s likely to be a dwindling number of slots, due also in
part to automation, has potential to be a catalyst for more senior-level, director roles. Judging by the widely varied and
conflicting forecasts generated by the analyst mill, statistics in this realm are questionable, though earnest, when they
set out to enumerate growth (or erosion) of jobs in the United States. Predictions range from dire to disquieting.
By its nature, coordinating employees or outsource providers across oceans and borders adds a layer of logistical complexity
that demands a managerial mind-set.
“The classic bad news is, your manager calls a meeting and says, ‘Your department is being outsourced’,” Trowbridge says.
“The IT worker with a better shot at success is the one willing to study how the work will be migrated, how that transition
will be managed, and what all the steps are. Learn that and you’ve just made yourself more valuable.”
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