Jobs at risk

Repetitive, commoditized IT work most likely to head offshore.

MedSite figured it could save money by using offshore resources to bulk up its IT staff, but the online marketing and education services firm also knew it had to think carefully about which jobs would make sense to push overseas.

Today, the company uses back-end application developers in Minsk, Belarus, as a way to cut its software development time by a third.

"We're not leveraging offshoring as a head-cutting resource, as much as leveraging it to augment our in-house expertise," says Jason Hogg, COO at the New York company.

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MedSite figured it could save money by using offshore resources to bulk up its IT staff, but the online marketing and education services firm also knew it had to think carefully about which jobs would make sense to push overseas.

Today, the company uses back-end application developers in Minsk, Belarus, as a way to cut its software development time by a third.

"We're not leveraging offshoring as a head-cutting resource, as much as leveraging it to augment our in-house expertise," says Jason Hogg, COO at the New York company.

By using the offshore resources through service provider Epam Systems, MedSite is able to increase and decrease its pool of developers as needed, while maintaining more critical business-focused software architecture expertise at home.

"What we did is we brought [offshore workers] in to co-develop the next version of our interactive detailing platform [a marketing program], which is a major initiative," Hogg says. "We work as a single project team: They're doing the back-end coding offshore, and we're doing the front-end architecture and user interfaces. So all of the front-end stuff is designed in-house and then moved offshore for actual development. . . . In doing so it enables us to do things much more cost-effectively and faster."

What’s the big deal? With more businesses looking at moving IT functions offshore as a way to cut costs, IT workers must focus on updating their skills to make their jobs less likely candidates to be shipped overseas. By the numbers A report IDC published in May listed the functions companies have been most likely to move offshore: 1. Legacy/custom application development. 2. Legacy application maintenance. 3. Web application development. 4. Customer care, services/call center. 5. Management of IT infrastructure/IT outsourcing. 6. Packaged application implementation. 7. Finance and accounting. 8. Procurement.

With more businesses looking seriously at sending IT work offshore, the question is what IT jobs are most at risk. St. Croix is not alone in deciding to offshore back-end functions that don't really give the business a competitive edge. Analysts say the more repetitive, commoditized positions such as application programming, database management, technical support and data entry are those most likely to be sent overseas.

"If you're doing maintenance work where an application is already built and you're sitting in a back office updating code or maintaining code, you may be at risk," says Ravi Kalakota, CEO of E-Business Strategies and co-author of Offshore Outsourcing, Business Models ROI and Best Practices. "Database management, database administration, the commodity database work probably can be done remotely, as well."

Forrester Research says offshore vendors continue to expand their offerings and are providing more in the way of business-process outsourcing, implementation of packaged applications, and remote monitoring and administration of infrastructure, all of which will expand the range of IT jobs that could be vulnerable to movement overseas.