OUTSOURCE: Competing in the Global Productivity Race (Yourdon Press Series) [ハードカバー]

I started reading this book with no high expectations. Yourdon is best known (notorious?) for the loud and repeated claims about the Y2K crisis, prior to 2000. He was hilariously wrong, though he certainly did well out of consulting and convening conferences over it. So I anticipated more of the same puffery here.

But gradually and grudgingly, I raised my opinion of this book. There are no shrill polemics. No hysterical call to arms. Instead, you get a sober (and sombre) study of offshoring. Yourdon goes calmly through the driving forces. He points out that the ongoing improvements in computer hardware (Moore's Law) and communications show no signs of abating. It is these which have made offshoring economic to date. And if those trends continue, offshoring can become even more persuasive.

Yourdon suggests that for you as an individual, try to quantify your productivity if you are an American information worker. He pointedly does not restrict his audience to IT. Then see if your productivity justifies your higher cost, relative to an offshore worker. If not, you should upgrade or even change professions. He makes a very cynical but cogent observation that if you do not quantify your own productivity, someone else might do it for you, like an offshore vendor, who will not have your interests at heart.

For an American company, Yourdon recommends a focus on Business Process Engineering. The book is thankfully short on acronyms and buzzwords. But it does advocate trying a radical improvement in your workflow, in order to stave off offshoring.

"OutSource" is a fast-read book that rapidly covers all of the

important ground regarding outsourcing today. Useful directly to

us knowledge workers, the book is also a must-read for any

business manager in just about any American company.

Yourdon points out a vast array of just-being-considered for

outsourcing disciplines. He also carefully goes through the

various issues of quality and long-distance management and how to

embrace these challenges. Although outsourcing is not new,

elements of the game are changing and the foreign fields remain

fertile and ever-suitable to a growing list of activities.

Yourdon explores government's torn role in this fate and he

continually provides both the knowledge worker (us) and our

employers with insight and advice. The book is a must read for

any modern worker as job-fluidity will only increase with

technology and we need to know how to cope and how to exploit.

Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race is a persuasive overview of the outsourcing phenomenon. Author Edward Yourdon's premise is that outsourcing is not going to disappear anytime soon, and -- given the success that many companies have begun enjoying during the past few years -- it is not likely to level off anytime soon. Outsourcing is now a mainstream phenomenon and is affecting more and more workers, in nearly every knowledge-based sector. In a nutshell, this is Yourdon's book of how to prepare yourself for the inevitable."

For those Americans who would hope their representatives in Washington would get involved and pass laws to stem the flow of jobs overseas, there is little that Washington will likely do to help knowledge-based workers whose jobs are in danger of being offshored. While the loss of jobs is a crisis to many of us, Yourdon makes note of the oil crisis of the early 1970s and a speech that Jimmy Carter made in April 1977. Carter said "If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions." Nearly 30 years after Carter made that speech, oil is at an all-time high and nothing has been significantly done to reduce our dependency on oil; or to find a better solution.

If Congress is apathetic when it comes to an effective energy policy that affects an entire nation, it is clear that preserving the jobs of C and Java programmers is likely to be at the bottom of any congressman's to-do list. In 2005, national security, Medicare and Iraq are just a few of the issues that seem to be far more pressing to the nation than the loss of programmers.

The book is written about outsourcing in general, but has a heavy slant to programmers whose jobs have been outsourced to India. The prime advantage India has over other countries with cheap labor is a large base of workers that speak English. While the salaries in China, for example, are even lower than in India, the language barrier is significant.

The main claims of proponents of outsourcing are of increased productivity and major cost savings. Whether these claims are real is to a degree immaterial, as the perception among CIOs is that outsourcing has an immediate cost savings. This is primarily due to the fact that the salaries and benefit costs of overseas programmers are radically less than those of their U.S. counterparts.

From a productivity and efficiency perspective, many Indian firms are CMM level-5 certified, something that their U.S. counterparts can't attest to. At the end of the day, is better and cheaper code produced in Bangalore and Mumbai? Yourdon states that it is hard to find hard and fast answers. But with outsourcing the rage, there is the perception that Indian firms are more productive, formalized and efficient than their US counterparts is being accepted as fact. For many, perception is reality, and the reality is that jobs are being sent overseas by the thousands.

Outsource:Competing in the Global Productivity Race is written for (and beneficial to) anyone who feels that his job may be in danger of being outsourced. The book is well-written and pragmatic, and Yourdon notes that there are no simple answers to be found, nor are there any obvious choices. The book guides the reader who is working in a knowledge-based position to better determine where the trends in outsourcing are going and how to best save their job and simultaneously prepare for the inevitable. It is not that every knowledge-based job will be outsourced, but rather that the potential exists that every job could be outsourced. With that, it behooves everyone to get make sure they are prepared.

In 1992, Yourdon wrote Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. In the book, he predicted that U.S. programmers would "suffer the fate of the Dodo bird" as companies shifted jobs from American workers to those overseas to take advantage of lower pay, less labor regulations and higher productivity. Yourdon admits his prediction was partially incorrect. U.S. programmers have not gone the way of the Dodo bird and hiring is resuming; but in spite of everything, huge numbers of jobs are being sent overseas.

While Decline and Fall of the American Programmer was focused exclusively on technology workers, Yourdon writes that every knowledge-based job is vulnerable to being outsourced. From radiologists to tax preparers, telemarketers to architects, and more.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of Outsource is the composed manner in which Yourdon writes. Outsourcing is a controversial, political and extremely emotional topic, and Yourdon provides a balanced view of the outsourcing phenomena.

One of the solutions suggested to stemming the flow of jobs overseas is protectionist federal regulations. Yourdon believes that such measures are doomed to fail, in that you can't protect knowledge-based worked in the same way that steel and agriculture products can be protected. Yourdon admits that there might be some short-term benefits to a protectionist strategy, but will fail in the long-term. His view is that protectionism is simply blaming someone else for the existence of competition; and such an approach does not solve the problem. His solution, and the overall advice in the book, is to make each and every American knowledge worker more prepared to face competition from overseas.

Of the books 10 chapters, the most compelling is chapter 6, which provides seven strategies in which to deal with the threat of outsourcing. The first is to be proactive, with the last being to consider a career change. Yourdon does not promise and secrets or miracles in the chapter and attempts to provide some common, yet often overlooked, sense.

Outsource ends with the following quote: "I was taught very early that I would have to depend entirely upon myself; that my future lay in my own hands." This book shows you how.