Talk:Student Projects:Outsourcing PPF
Thanks for your quick response. My main idea is to work within the basic framework that you guys have already set up- past, present and future. We should look at the history of the rise of corporations, cost accounting, and such and see how that has impacted business decisions in the past. Then we would move into the present- which would include outsourcing (reasons for it, its effect on the economy) and H1B visas (and their impact on the domestic economy). The issue here is, America is sending jobs overseas and it is filling jobs in America with places for visas. This would bring us to the future: our policy suggestion. Here is the fork in the road: we can either say that the best thing for our future would be to continue outsourcing and cut H1B visas or find ways to stop outsourcing and continue H1B visas for the jobs we have here.
We can not take this H1B visa route at all, also. The way I see it though, this gives us a chance to frame a debate and then give our suggestions. In this sense, we are tying together history, the present state of affairs, and then the future- and how we can shape it with our suggestions. Then we would have a perfect three part paper.
How does this sound? Here is the link I posted earlier which is critical of the H1B visa program. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html
Looking over what you guys initially wrote on the site, I think we can add to what I said yesterday. I see that you guys wanted to compare India to the U.S. and address the brain dress issue. Once we take a side on H1B visas, we can see how cutting them off, or letting them continue would impact India. For example, if we say cut H1B visas, then we can see if this will benefit India- since it would keep highly intelligent people there. And the opposite would be, if we are for H1B visas, does the brain drain end up hurting India. I didn't include this yesterday because I wanted to make sure that we didn't over-extend ourselves. But this would keep closer to the original idea you set out.
most of Kiran's post was moved to the Visas page.
and thoughts along those lines.....anyway, we can examine all these in greater detail in the final report. for now, i 'd suggest we all get together to write a really good draft/1-page report which we need to submit by nov 1st, i think.
Brad Struss: There was a study just completed by Seattle University regarding the impact outsourcing has had on companies here in Washington State. The study of ten companies showed that only one company performed laid workers off as a result of hiring outsourced workers. Here's an article in the Seattle Times with more details: http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=outsource21&date=20041021&query=outsourcing (requires users registration)
The complete report is here: http://www.rateconline.org/docs/RATEC%20-SEASIM%20Global%20IT%20Soucing%20Study%20FINAL%20DOC.pdf
I would be interested in participating in this group if there is still space.
David Dorwin wrote:
It took longer than I thought, but I completed importing our emails and discussions to the new Wiki pages. I also added some of my thoughts that I had regarding Kiran?s email. Have a look!
Fantastic job, David!
Andreas: We haven't yet heard from you. Please do make yourself heard, and participate on the Wiki :)
I'll be putting in some additional material sometime tonight. Also, it would be great if we start working towards the 'who does what' part of the project.
Here's what I suggest: (I'll add this to the Wiki later) o David: put outsourcing in context of US politics o Diwaker: case study on the H1-B visa issue o Kiran: analyze outsourcing from an Indian perspective o Stuart: the "past" and "rise" of outsourcing o Andreas: talk to us!
How does that sound?
Cheers! Diwaker
User:kirkal I agree with Diwaker - FANTASTIC job, David!regarding my core area, sounds just fine : possible overlap with David and Diwaker's areas? lets see...it should do for now,though.
cheers, Kiran
Hi,
I was wondering if everyone has their draft ready. I will probably use the paragraph I already have. If I make any changes, I will be sure to do it by tonight, so we can submit it tomorrow. Also, has anyone heard from Andrae? I have not heard from him. I am sending this e-mail to him as well, so I'm hoping he'll speak up!
If anyone is having trouble drafting their part, tell me, and I'll try to help.
Sincerely, Stuart Berkeley '06 USER:S.Schimler
I have made some changes (organizational and outline) to the description page -- I think we shud just add our stuff here and send the link to Tapan:
I'll add my stuff to the present section, including sources where appropriate. Everyone else please do the same. Nope, no news from Andrea yet.
Cheers, Diwaker
Hi. It's Andrae. sorry for the delayed response. I've had a bit of a personal emergency this past week. I'm back in Berkeley and ready to get to work. Just wanted to let you know I'm here. Andrae
User:kirkal
Hi!Andrae!
Glad to finally hear from you. Now, as Diwaker suggested, please go to the project page and put in your thoughts. Also, please try to let us know an area of interest where you will be focusing your efforts. This is not to sya that you can't have a role in other fields, jut that you will be primarily responsible for the section you choose.
Do visit the project web page and input your thoughts.
Thanks!
Cheers, Kiran
Hi everyone,
Welcome Andrae! Hope you've taken a look at the material we have so far. Its already almost midnight on the East coast, so I'm assuming that everyone is done putting in their stuff. I'm going to send Tap an email at midnight PST, unless someone has any objections to this. If you want a change of plans, please send me an email ASAP.
I think the proposal is in good shape. We perhaps need a couple of lines and some more references in the past and the future sections? I've put in some that I could find. Please go ahead and make changes as appropriate.
Cheers! Diwaker
Hi,
I have some references for the past. I will try to put them up tonight! However, can we wait to do the submission early Monday tomorrow? I'll try my best to put up a couple of references by 11:30 tonight (pacific time). thanks
-Stuart USER:S.Schimler
I added a paragraph (#2)to the intro. I want to make it clear up front that we are not just focusing on the strict definition of "outsourcing". Furthermore, I don't think we're going to spend time on outsourcing to other US companies/workers. The rest of the new paragraph leads into the other three.
Do you think we should move the first paragraph of the intro to the Past section? It's kind of random in this intro. That doesn't mean it can't be in the intro of our paper.
I also added a note about the references on the main page. We have a lot, but we aren't sure whether we'll use them all or what section they fit into.
Finally, I added a paragraph to the future. Do you think we need some text in 5 (not 5.x)? The other sections each have some text.
Let me know what you guys think.
David
Hi,
I added a little bit to the past section. I believe that oursourcing has deeper historical roots than the past 20 years. It is for that reason that you will see that my additions focus more on history. I will certainly explore the contemporary conditions. But others in the group will be talking about the current state of affairs; so I should probably try to make minor comparisons within my analysis. We'll talk more about this when the time comes.
On the front page of the site, I recommened that we look for more Academic sources. Web links are usually very bad sources for professionally written papers. If you have a scholar cited in the article, find that scholar's CV online and find his published works. They will be better to use for citations. Have a good night! Sincerely,
Stuart Schimler UC Berkeley 2006 User:S.Schimler
User:kirkal
hi!All!
made a few additions to the future section...the proposal looks good, ppl!nice job! -Kiran
Hi,
I added a couple of lines to that future part. It sounds half-way decent. I'm half asleep, so I can't really tell. Feel free to improve on it!
-Stuart USER:S.Schimler
Hey everyone,
Since the submissions are due by end of day on Monday, we can hold off until sometime tomorrow.
good night!
Diwaker
User:kirkal
hi!all!
I guess the proposal is as complete as it can get. if no one objects to
this in the next half hour, i will go ahead and submit it. you have
been warned! ;-);-)
Kiran
I agree with Stuart about using academic sources. I was looking for references on the US tax incentives to put on our description page, and came across all of those. Some of the sites are clearly biased and others are just articles, but I figured they might give us some ideas on different viewpoints or point us to some better sources. I posted them so that I can read them in the future. Do you have some pointers on where we should search academic resources on outsourcing? Search engines aren't very helpful for that purpose. Unfortunately, there isn't a "Journal of Outsourcing". I'm guessing that some business journals have had some articles. ACM and IEEE may have also.
David
User:kirkal
hi!ppl!
yes, the idea is definitely good...but, as David pointed out, we really have no idea of which source can be considered as an authoritative must-refer-to versus a mere article. one doubt here,though: does this mean we can't cite articles from magazines like "Wired" as our sources? Maybe we can try "The Economist". Thats a very high-fi magazine for economics and should be accepted as a definitive source.
also, I'd like to draw a distinction here: for policy matters, we should not use articles as references but , for the other areas of our brief, dealing with past and present trends and future suggestions, i do think referring to articles makes sense. History - Stuart will have to let us know if there is an exhaustive repository like at Citeseer for tech. papers.If so, we can use them else go with the articles for the trends section - but articles from reputed magazines would be more desirable,I guess.
cheers, Kiran
Hi,
Yes, you can use prestigious magazines- especially for contemporary events where Academics might be a step behind. If any experts are mentioned, track them down and look at their resume for their published works. Then you'll have a better source. Online websites with no real authority are very bad sources. Wired sounds good though. Newspapers, such as the NY Times are also acceptable; as is the Wall Street Journal, which might be a particularly good source for us. For history, most works will be done by business historians and faculty. There are some history journals on JSTOR. (www.jstor.org) See if your library will give you access. I'm sure UCSD will, since UCB does. Check it out. You can search through lots of journals!
We all have top notch research libraries, so there shouldn't be a real problem. You should do a library search and see what you can find. Using a Berkeley search, I just found a couple of works:
Outsourcing for radical change : a bold approach to enterprise transformation / <2004> Author: Linder, Jane C. Published: New York : AMACOM, c2004 and
Outsourcing in a global economy / <2002> Author: Grossman, Gene M. Published: Cambridge, MA. : National Bureau of Economic Research, c2002. So these books will probably be good and I am sure there are others. If you need to track down a specific topic, tell me, and I'll see if I can help.
Sincerely, Stuart USER:S.Schimler
Hi all,
I think I?m struggling with the concept of a policy brief versus a research paper or analysis of the overall issue. There are a lot of areas for debate in the outsourcing/offshoring topic, but many of them don?t actually relate directly to policy (they relate to do companies actually save money, etc.). We could fill our paper with a lot of information and examples, but we need to make sure they focus on the policy issues, right?
I also think we need to solidify our direction. We need to decide on what topics we want to attack and how. What are the actual policy issues we can address? There is a lot of literature, data, articles, etc. on whether a company should outsource, how much money outsourcing is saving companies, etc., but that doesn?t really belong in our ?issue? paper. So, what topics can we address? Visas of course; current tax benefits for offshoring; tax benefits for keeping jobs in the US; tax benefits in the outsourcee country; banning offshoring; trade policies and tariffs; others? Coming up with data on national security would probably be difficult. For tax (or any other) incentives, we should definitely try to determine whether they have or will encourage teams to outsource. Once we narrow in on the topics we want to address, we can split them up.
Visas are the easiest one to address because there is existing law and two clear sides. Taxes are a little more difficult because there is one existing law that allegedly gives benefits, but there is no law giving benefits to keeping jobs in the US. For this side, we would have to invent tax law or try to find some real proposals made by congressmen or others. (We may find some proposals for tax and other laws on the anti-outsourcing web sites or in articles.)
Also, we should probably be careful in how we use history. If this is policy brief, the congressman (or whoever) isn?t going to want a history lesson. But history will be valuable if we can use it to support our policy recommendations. History is the one area that we seem to have a handle on thanks to Stuart.
Other random thoughts I had today:
· SMM had some good points on economics in his feedback. Have any of you taken economics and might like to address this issue? I have not taken economics.
· We should definitely look at possible repercussions of enacting policy regarding outsourcing (on both sides). This article presents some interesting ideas on the subject: http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/BusinessWeek/2004/03/29/397929?nbdTopicID=26
· One position we could take is that companies will eventually realize that they are not saving money and the rate of outsourcing will decrease. This counters some estimates by respected research groups (like Forester, Gartner, etc.), but there have also been reports that companies are not saving as much as they?d like. Also, wages (and thus costs) will likely increase in these other countries. There has been speculation that the outsourcing will then move to other countries and that current outsourcee countries may even outsource to other countries. Historical examples could be useful here.
· Question: Is it good for the US and the world for economic conditions in other countries to be improved? Oracles? Larry Ellison had some interesting thoughts on this: http://www.enterblog.com/200410270953.html?PHPSESSID=ea53ce302ba6834ff8398dac8dc0ecb4
· One site said that ?offshore outsourcing has actually had a positive impact on the American economy.? Can we find any sources that state this?
· Does interfering in free trade with protectionism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism) end up hurting US consumers and/or the economy?
· Would examples of each side (successful and beneficial outsourcing; US jobs lost) be a good thing to put in our paper?
· Another angle: Is the rise of other countries (India, etc.) as large insourcees (because US and other countries are outsourcing to them) putting the US economy, which itself has a lot of insourcing, at risk? Related blog entry: http://www.enterblog.com/200410250656.html
Finally, I added to the References section. Have a look.
David
Hey everyone,
Moving forward with David's email, I've put up my notes for a couple of other sources (all academic so far) I've looked at. As a reminder, the notes page is at:
Since this is a public policy course, I strongly feel that we should keep away from the non-policy issues regarding outsourcing as much as possible. Of course we should include relevant data where it adds some value to our report. Over the next few days I'll compile in notes for the H1-B visa case study.
As for taking a standpoint, IMHO I think that in the long run, given the present economy, outsourcing is inevitable. Its like commoditization of services -- now that outsourcing has started taking place at the level of "services" or "processes" no company really has the incentive to do all these commodity jobs in-house when there are multiple competitive suppliers in the market. While it might be true that the profits made by companies by outsourcing have been diminishing, it doesn't mean that switching to that activity in-house will lead to profits.
Of course, we need to debate both sides arrogantly before making a final stand. This will naturally involve looking at tax benefit issues, data on banning offshoring.
I had taken a course on macroeconomics as a first year undergrad, but only memories remain from that course. From what Steve said, it seems to me that he was talking about some of the economic reasons behind outsourcing. Unless someone else is interested and/or has the necessary background to dig into this, I am willing to give it a shot.
Look at the most recent entry in my notes page, that chapter talks about some of the things Steve was talking about.
The other thing to do I guess is collect numbers -- even if we're not going to use all of them. For instance, number supporting the fact that outsourcing is *big*, or its creating *lots* of jobs in countries like India, numbers comparing cost savings of companies, salaries of IT workers in the US and in India, China etc. Either someone can take this responsibility and systematically try to dig up these figures, or we can put in data at a common place as and when we run into it.
Though even Steve doesn't talk a lot about the policy issues in this area -- should we ping him to see if we are missing any of the policy aspects (litigations that we might not be aware of, bills in the pipeline that we may never find out about, general opinion in the congress etc).
The website cspp.org (from Ed's reference) seems quite interesting as well.
Lets talk! Diwaker
USER:S.SchimlerDavid,
You are precisely correct- there must be a policy suggestion. A lot of our sources give facts; we will need to draw a conclusion after that. So it is a good idea to zone in on one of the questions you want answer. I'll leave it up to the other group members to decide. Whichever path you want to go down should be ok with me; there is a 90% chance that I will be able to find historical roots/examples for any question. To answer another one of your questions, I have taken economics; however, I don't think I have advanced enough training to do the analysis that Maurer is looking for. We should probably leave that out or else I will surely mess it up! But if anyone else has more advanced knowledge, feel free to fill the rest of us in.
Sincerely, Stuart
User:kirkal hi ppl,well, the references section seems to be quite exhaustive. I think we can stop collecting references ,for now, and start, as Stuart suggested, zeroing in on policy initiatives that have occurred and recommendations that we would like to suggest. While Stuart has left the door open on the direction we might want to take, I do think that we need to do one of two things: a. Examine both sides of the issue and argue for both sides - listing pros and cons on each side and possibly, an innovative suggestion in favour of each side that we argue. b. Survey both(or more) sides of the issue and take a stand on any one side. Argue forcefully(or at least convincingly) for that.
Another thing we need to note is that we are running out of time - so i suggest that , by the week beginning after Thanksgiving, we all have a clear idea of the approach we want to use.Once that is done, with the report requirement being abt 40-50 pages , each of us can maybe write up detailed analyses of our area of focus and put it up for review by the other members. There is bound to be overlap and some new topics might even get thrown up - it is *essential*,therefore,that we have an initial review at least by Dec. 2. The finessing and polishing shouldn't take too long after tht. What do you all say? Do you concur?
Someone asked about references abt the 10-year tax holiday - well, I can't give academic references. But, as my mom runs a software firm back home, I am pretty sure abt my facts. I'll try to get the relevant Govt. Order but I can't promise anything.
also, guys, look into the McKinsey reports(david already provided links to them) - they have some truly relevant graphs and might make lots of things very simple. now, a general q: i read a Doonesbury strip the other day that lampooned the outsourcing trend to India pretty well- maybe we can use that strip in out introduction or at least in the beginning of my portion. Is it allowed?
Finally, Stuart, at the risk of bugging you, were you able to find any resources abt the history of IT outsourcing ie similar movements in manufacturing and so on? Do let me know. we need to have a great history section.
write in,ppl!
