Rural Outsourcing

These days we all hear about the largest companies in the US consistently outsourcing throughout the world.  Throughout the past, much of the smaller companies tend to outsource to smaller less populated US areas.  They also tend to outsource worldwide, but to much less metropolitan like areas.  By doing so, they are able to reduce the overall cost of their respected projects by about 30%.  Recently, some much larger companies have started or thought  about beginning the process to outsource to rural areas around the united states and to less dense areas of India.  A company from Canada, CGI, is looking to outsource 20% of its total outsourcing projects to areas of less than 50,000 people.  CGI is the company who has helped this rural area outsourcing trend along.  They currently employ over 31,000 employees, far from a start up company.  Along with the cost reduction of the rural outsourcing, this may also increase the support from local citizens. 

Outsourceing CRM

Today in class and apparently over the next few weeks we talked and will talk about Outsourcing.  While outsourcing is a way to help run compainies more efficiently and expand their own market share, we need to realize that there is more to it then just calling a contractor and giving them a job.  I feel the most important link to outsourcing, especially if it will interfere with the customer, is succeeding in customer relationship management (CRM).  In the Carnival Cruise Line case, they explained that third party companies were not collecting the right amount or sufficient data from customers as they called in.  They stated that these outsourced companies did not care as much as they did about the information provided and could not rely on the data to be accurate. 
The article above explained that companies are becoming more reliant on CRM, but are outsourcing it to other vendors.  There are several companies that have grown tremendously just focusing on CRM for other firms.  Their main focus is to understand that CRM is so important that they must provide the best customer service at every level.

IT: A life of opportunity

This weeks blog isn’t about anything specific I have read or anything I heard about.  There was something that grabbed my attention this week and it was something that Mr. Tony Ravani mentioned during our DSS on Friday.  Like I have mentioned several times throughout this semester, I am not the most tech savvy and potentially the most out dated grad student around.  I guess sometimes drastic change isn’t welcome to me, but I do like challenges.  Anyway, Mr. Ravani showed a cluster of wires around a small town in most likely a 3^rd world country.  When he asked us what this meant to us we mentioned several different things, but not what he mentioned.  He said opportunity.  Until then, I did not see the significance in me learning everything about the IT world.  I figured I would get the most out of whatever is taught to me and would get by with that.  Now I realize how much opportunity and change is yet to come after Mr. Ravani’s comment and Dr. Schwarz’s remark about how this is just the beginning.  I can see the resistance I will face if I don’t overcome my fear of learning new and whats seems like foreign technological advances ahead of me.  After Friday, I realized that technology is now my future.