What programming tasks can be outsourced to India?
Eduardo Porter reports on the limits some firms (and even U.S.-Indian entrepreneurs) have reached in outsourcing programming jobs to India, in today's New York Times.
- "Mr. Pradhan, who is Indian-educated, disagrees with critics who say that Indian-trained workers lack creative ability...
But Mr. Pradhan agreed that the need for proximity to the final user of the technology does place limits on what types of tasks can be outsourced. "Whenever the pace of innovation is very rapid," he said, "is when the work should be done closer to the client."
In the future international division of labor, Mr. Pradhan said, the production of the technology will be done in places like India, which can deliver it reliably at a low cost. What cannot be sent to India, he said, is the invention of new business processes and technologies.
Conceiving inventory-management software that helps a retailer make the best use of electronic product tags, for example, might be something best done by system designers in the United States working closely with the retailer. Once such a system and its tasks have been mapped out, though, the software code could be written by programmers in India.
...Innovative business processes result from "an understanding of the business that happens when people get into a room and talk to each other," Mr. Pradhan said. "That is very difficult to outsource."
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