My Dads Bigger than your Dad

Following Peter Allens 28th July Post, heres another take on Country v Country. Reminiscent of schoolboy (do schoolgirls also do this?) playground one-upmanship, where arguments would escalate to include ‘implied’ threats of how things were going to end up if the argument continued with statements such as “My dads bigger than your dad”…and the normal response of…”well my dads in the Army”..etc etc...is now spilling over into the Outsourcing debate. It’s almost impossible to avoid the buzz of articles with commentaries comparing countries against each other in their ‘suitability’ for offshore outsourcing. Singapore claims to be better than Malaysia (Nothing new in that and vice versa) the new kid on the block Vietnam claiming to be bigger and better than its South East Asian ‘peer group’ countries and Russia doing all it can to drop its playground bully image with promises to be a good boy and far more friendly in future. Of course the comparison process is way too difficult to generalise as there are almost as many business processes and application being outsourced as there are locations competing to attract them. Certain types of processes will undoubtedly work better in certain locations, but there are so many variables that involve Labour supply, legislation, FDI and taxation policies, maturity of vendors, quality, infrastructure, language, culture and so on, rendering a general ‘comparison’ pretty much impractical. All companies considering offshore outsourcing initiatives must look to where best suits the process, part or service that they are about to outsource, as well as what also best suits their company culture and working methods and aspirations to establish which is their ‘Best Source’ location. Is it logical to outsource your CRM to a call centre in a suburb of Kalyan-Dombivali India because its very cheap, or perhaps more sense to a ‘best source location like Malaysia where the costs are undoubtedly higher, but where English is the ‘unofficial’ national language and an empathy with the people they are communicating with due to the 100’s of thousands of students who have been educated in the US, UK, Australia etc over the past 20 years?