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The term outsourcing is not very new to us and neither is it new to the dictionary. We have been outsourcing our work for ages now. Take an example of the plumber. While you can yourself try and fix the pipe but because it is more convenient for you to hire a plumber from outside, you call him, get the pipe fixed and pay him. This is called outsourcing when it becomes a regular matter. Now imagine that you own a huge building and there are frequent pipe bursts and you don't want to be contacted everytime such a thing happens because you have other important issues to handle. In that case the best option would be to employ an external agency which would take all such complaints and send a plumber then and there without bothering you. Now this is called outsourcing. You have outsourced a part of your work to another company to which you pay for their services and save your time for utilizing it more productively elsewhere. The word outsourcing became extremely popular when the software industries in a bid to cut their costs started sending out a part of their work to countries like India.
It was a similar task like the one in the example given above. These companies could do the entire job on their own but the outsourcing of certain portions of work helped them in saving not just money but also time. This time could be utilized elsewhere or in the development new products. Initially most of the IT companies outsourced only the testing jobs to Indian companies. Testing is like proofreading. The testing software will have to check the entire code for any kind of flaws or bugs and then debug the program so that it may function properly. This kind of work was outsourced mainly due to the fact that this was time consuming and the labor costs in India were almost one-fifth of those in USA. Thus, at such low rates these companies found that outsourcing such projects was far more convenient than doing it at home. This wave of outsourcing led to the sprouting up of hundreds of large and small IT support companies in India. Thus, with different kind of specializations that these companies had, the kind of outsourcing work also started increasing with even software development, maintenance and even customer support being outsourced. And now with the greater invasion of internet into our daily lives and various online websites, small and big software projects or web content development projects are also being outsourced to other countries. Whatever the critics of outsourcing may say but at the end of the day everyone should come to terms with the fact that outsourcing is here to stay and for as long as the labor costs don't come to a level plane everywhere across the globe. |
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