Offshore Outsourcing is About Finding the Best Talent

IBA GroupMark Kobayashi-HillaryOffshore outsourcing (often called offshoring) often gets a bad press. Many people assume that offshoring must be all about finding the lowest cost service and therefore the world is engaged in an endless race to the bottom, searching for lower and lower costs.It’s not like that at all. An interesting article in the business magazine Forbes challenges the conventional wisdom on outsourcing. For instance, even though the US and Europe account for about half the economic activity of the entire world, only about 10% of the global population lives in these two regions.This means that there are an enormous number of highly skilled people outside the wealthiest nations on earth. Working with this talent is essential because of the difficulties involved in finding these people locally.And many companies are more globally oriented today. If you wanted a new logo designed in the past then it would be done by a local designer, now it’s done anywhere in the world based on finding a designer you like. Any intellectual task can now be performed anywhere in the world so the issue today for companies of all sizes is that if you are not working globally then how are you finding enough skilled resource to keep you ahead of the game?And finding the right talent to support your team back in headquarters is only half the story. If you want to expand to new markets, what could be better than working with a team of people in those new markets to give you a footprint and a first step into the new region?Offshoring has often been misrepresented, but it is now an essential part of corporate strategy that aims at making the skills of the entire world available to clients, wherever they are located.