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Onshore Outsourcing: Made In America – Startup Rural Sourcing

TCS is looking to hire about 1,000 workers in the United States this year. Once trained, some of the workers will be dispatched to TCS development centers in Missoula, Mont.; Cary, N.C.; and several other smaller communities around the country.

Startup Rural Sourcing has an alternative to offshoring: outsource IT work to smaller U.S. cities. The pitch? It’s still cheap and helps American workers.

Why send IT work to India when you can pay a little more and have it done in middle America or the South? The concept of providing IT services from some lower-cost regions in the United States made so much sense to Kathy White, former CIO at health-care conglomerate Cardinal Health Inc., that she took $2 million of her own money and started a business around it. "If we can outsource to India, then we can outsource to Arkansas," White says.

Kathy White sees an untapped base of unemployed people across the country

With that idea in mind, White last year launched Rural Sourcing Inc., an application-development provider that operates in small towns such as Jonesboro, Ark., and Greenville, N.C. Her goal is to build a company that provides high-quality IT work at a reasonable cost while employing Americans. "I believe in a global economy," White says. "What I don’t believe in is for us to leave untapped potential in a base of people who are unemployed and eliminate a whole profession in the U.S."

Although recent government statistics show that IT employment in this country has rebounded strongly since the dot-com crash and 9/11, many labor advocates, such as Alliance@IBM and the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, say the practice of moving computer programming and services jobs to low-cost countries such as India and China has left too many American IT workers unemployed.

White wants to help fix that. The idea for Rural Sourcing came to her while she was CIO at Cardinal Health, a post she assumed in 1999 following Cardinal’s acquisition of Baxter Healthcare, where White served as technology chief. In the mid-’90s, when much of Baxter’s IT staff was tied up with a major SAP enterprise-resource-planning implementation, White needed help with basic application maintenance. She turned to the computer-science department at her alma mater, Arkansas State University. With the help of school administrators, she launched an internship program under which students could gain practical experience by working on projects for Baxter.

White also believed the program could serve as a farm system for the health-care company’s IT department. "The goal was to get people working with us and then recruit and train them," she says.

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Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai, India, recently opened a training facility in Buffalo, N.Y. Company officials say the city’s proximity to a number of top educational institutions and its relatively low costs make it an ideal location. "It’s very attractive from a cost basis, and we can recruit from the regional population," says Arup Gupta, president of TCS North America.

Once trained, some of the workers will be dispatched to TCS development centers in Missoula, Mont.; Cary, N.C.; and several other smaller communities around the country.

TCS is looking to hire about 1,000 workers in the United States this year.

Gupta’s concern: Skill shortages mean he might not be able to fill all the positions. "There are only so many individuals that can make the cut," Gupta says. Programmers with experience adapting packaged applications such as Oracle and PeopleSoft for use in specific industries, including manufacturing and retail, are in short supply, not only in the United States but worldwide, Gupta says.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek

Full Story: http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162800086

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Outsourced Colo. jobs rile unemployed

By Paul Johnson
9News

Yes, it s the kind of job I could have done, and would have been happy to do. … I liked the people. I liked the work. — Steve Austin, laid off in March from an Englewood company, on the information technology work outsourced by Colorado. (9News / Corky Scholl)

Nearly $2.5 million in state money will go to a firm based in India to create a computer system designed to get Coloradans working.

The contract was awarded in March to HCL Technologies by the Colorado Department of Human Services. It calls for HCL to build a computer system called the Rehabilitation Information System for Employment, or RISE, for the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation.

RISE will be an electronic case-management and planning system, used to help retrain disabled residents for employment.

Full Story: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_2746256

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