Uttiya Dasgupta is the President of Omnispan LLC, a vendor-neutral offshoring advisory firm in Minnesota, which he founded in 2005. He brings real-world experience from both client and provider ends of offshoring. From 1985 to 1997, he worked in Bangalore, India in managing offshore startups of Texas Instruments, IBM and Samsung and partnering with several Indian offshore providers. From 1997 to 2005 he was the Director of Software Development at IDeaS Inc. in Minnesota, in which he leveraged offshore outsourcing to India. He also coordinated the setup of an IDeaS India subsidiary. Contact Uttiya at uttiya (at) omnispan.net or visit http://www.omnispan.net.

It is interesting to see some companies bringing back operations in-house, after a rather unsuccessful offshore venture. Home-shoring is a word used by analysts to define this practice, although it could be argued that if you are working at home, then - where is the shore?

The reasons given are manifold - lack of anticipated cost savings, poor customer relations, complexity in managing offshore operations are frequently quoted. However one has to ponder the extent to which these aspects were planned in advance, and implemented with appropriate management and corrective actions.

Assuming that a provider is technically capable, the outputs produced by an offshoring process are a simple function of the inputs created by the client. Preparations and governance are two major inputs, the qualities of which determine the outcomes of offshoring. An a-priori understanding of the provider perspective (for example on stepping into a provider's shoes, a seemingly complete specification document may appear to contain lot of gaps), can ease the travel, when the rubber meets the road.