My experience is that most people think of “outsourcing” and “offshoring” as synonyms. We talk about the general category of outsourcing with slight repugnance, acknowledging that it is occasionally useful for more mundane and unskilled tasks, but it simply won’t work for the more creative tasks that require an American to do it well. (Maybe nobody blatantly says it requires an American, but we know what you’re implying.)
I don’t intend to address the “Americans are better at creative work” myth, but I will say this: my hypothesis is that any perceived difference in the quality of outsourced work has more to do with the size of the team, access to the stakeholders and end-user, and the ownership and responsibility felt by the people doing the work than it does their nationality, all factors which can also affect an internal team. But I have no experience with offshoring, so I can’t speak to that.
Instead, I want to clarify that offshoring is but one category of outsourcing.
You may not call it “outsourcing”, but you do it all the time
“Outsourcing” simply means paying someone else do work that you could do, usually because they can do it cheaper, better or faster, or any combination of those. We all outsource all of the time. As cofounder of Keepers Household, Inc., I could have our maintenance staff–a position currently held by yours truely–take the time to figure out why the washing machine sometimes doesn’t spin, but not only do I have no interest in this task, I can pay someone else that can diagnose the problem quicker and probably fix it better than I can. I’m exchanging a little money for a working washing machine and a few hours back to do what I’m good at and enjoy1.
In nearly three years of doing web application development at Collective Idea, I can only think of one or two small projects where we didn’t “outsource” parts of the project. On every other project, we’ve worked in conjunction with one or more companies or individuals on various aspects.
It’s not just about getting it cheaper
Design, for example, is an area that we often outsource. We believe strongly in the importance of good interface design, and doing it as early as possible in the project. We can do design ourselves (or at least pretend to), but it is extremely inefficient for us. It is not a core competency, nor is it an area where we have a real competitive advantage.
So we have two options: hire someone that is good and efficient at design, or outsource it. Most companies choose to hire someone, assuming that they will get a better value and the direct access to the designer will yield quicker and higher quality results.
Instead, we outsource it to one of the designers that we know, and not only is the result much better than we could have managed, it is much cheaper. The result is better because we get to work with better designers—people that we couldn’t afford to employ—and they bring with them the experience of all the other projects that they’ve worked on, successes and failures. While the may bill us at a much higher rate than we could have done it ourselves, in the end, it’s still a better value because they make fewer mistakes and are more efficient.
But ultimately, it’s not about getting design done cheaper, it’s about getting it done better. Cheaper just happens to be a nice side effect. We outsource design because we can’t afford to not do it well, so we want the most creative people we can find.
Not just the mundane
On one end of the spectrum of work is the repetitive, dull tasks that anybody can do. And on the other end is the highly creative or skilled work that only a handful of people can do. I disagree with the notion that only the mundane and uncreative tasks are the candidates for outsourcing. The closer the work is to either edge of that spectrum, the more it could benefit from outsourcing.
Besides design, we’ve also outsourced things that require very specialized knowledge or skills. Occasionally we have interest and can afford to pursue those areas ourselves, but usually it’s more cost-effective and productive to bring in someone that already has experience, for the same reasons we outsource design.
This post is partly inspired by Outsourcing Killed By Django And Ruby On Rails, which argues that the Django and Rails web frameworks have allowed us to compete with the big guns because the frameworks eliminate the 80% of mundane tasks that would otherwise be offshored, allowing us to focus on the creative aspects.
While I agree with their argument that these frameworks eliminate the mundane tasks and allow us to be more efficient, I would argue that more efficiency comes from other factors which have more to do with the culture around these frameworks, such as smaller team sizes, open communication and releasing early which forces you to focus on core features needed by existing users instead of what potential users might want. But I digress…
More importantly, I disagree with their premise that these frameworks have killed outsourcing. From my perspective, they have done exactly the opposite, and it is the ability of small specialized teams to outsource that gives them an even greater edge on the corporate competition.
If frameworks like Django and Rails are killing anything, I would hope that it is the culture of corporate software manufacturing, or the idea that we can just put more cheap labor on the software assembly line and get better results.
