Mumbai Bombings Give Outsourcing Community Pause

theodp writes "eWeek reports that the big fear of offshore outsourcing customers has become a reality: a major bombing attack in an outsourcing hub. In the wake of the attack, companies are considering their resources and preparedness. Despite understandable fears, people on the ground don't seem to think these latest attacks will have a long-term effect on the growth of India's tech sector." From the article: "The terrorist attack in Mumbai--and conflict between Israel and Lebanon for that matter--raise a series of questions for companies sourcing technology globally. Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers? "

Come on, guys..

I know /.ers aren't too pleased with all this outsourcing, but isn't this reaction a bit extreme?

Re:Come on, guys..

No, it raises a very good question.

Are they ready for it? You can't just pick any non-industrialized nation, point and say "this is where our billion dollar software project will be made."

I'm not saying smack about India [cuz frankly I've never been there] but if the region isn't ready for the business in terms of economic, academic and political stability then maybe it isn't wise to DEPEND on them for your business?

It's one thing to ADD to your team with developers from other nations, e.g. setup a firm in Ireland or HK or something. It's another alltogether to depend solely on foreign assets.

Frankly I like the idea of spreading jobs around the globe, but only if the recipients are actually qualified to do the job. And while I like beating up on the average lame india post [see comp.lang.c] I'm not foolish enough to think that North Americans are all that much better in that regard.

Tom

Re:Come on, guys..

not industrialized != politically unstable. look at uruguay, it's a fucking haven.

Re:Come on, guys..

Excuse me. I am an Indian and I live in Mumbai. Within 6-8 hours of the blasts the railway system had resumed completely. Everybody resumed their work on the very next day. Schools, Colleges, Offices - everything remained open. Nobody panicked. There was no chaos. There were no riots. Life was as it was before the bombings. Only thing that is worth mentioning was that the telephone networks ( cellular and POTS ) were jammed due to excessive calls. Oh and yes, people were searching for the dead / injured ones. But that has nothing to do with technology right? :/

Now compare this with what happened in London, Madrid, NYC. Being in a particular region doesnt make you 100% safe from such things. It can happen to anywhere, at any place without any warning.

What creates terrorists

is poor, desparate men and women with nothing to lose. Take someone, give them a job, a family and a future and see how eager they are to plant bombs on trains. That said, in 20 years when America's job market is flooded with 30 million+ (now legal) immigrants working for $5.15/hr, india and china's industrialization has drivin gas up to $10/gallon and a loaf of bread is $5-$10 dollars, expect to see random bombings and shootings here too.

Home sweet home

Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.

Re:Home sweet home

Hard to bomb a wheat field. :-)

Only a cereal killer would do that.

Re:Home sweet home

Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.

Completely right there. This is just self interested posturing, not a genuine concern. Besides which we don't usually talk about the Israeli IT industry as 'outsourcing'.

Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.

What do slashdotters tell the people whose clerical jobs are being replaced by the systems they are developing? There is a bizare doublespeak here: Outsourcing bad, automation good. Historically IT people have been really good at protecting their own job security while making everyone else's job insecure.

Given the state of the IT job market I have a hard time feeling sorry for folk being outsourced. There are plenty of IT jobs around - if you actually have the skills that are in demand. And that should not be a problem if you really are worth the prices IT people expect.

The people who have difficulty getting a new position are the folk without formal qualifications and without a depth of knowledge in a useful field. Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.

Re:Home sweet home

Maybe New Orleans is a nice safe place. Of course the San Andreas fault is never going to crack so California is fine. But I like the weather in Florida so that could be a good choice.

So a question: Where in the world is politically stable, economically stable, is free (so far) of catastrophic natural disasters and as a bonus has a decent climate?

London, Madrid or New York

Your attempt at irony is in extremely poor taste, even for a Slashdot nerd.

    The peoples of London, Madrid and New York were murdered at random by monsters who came to those places from distant lands where it is common to settle minor disputes by horrific acts of violence. The peoples of London, Madrid, and New York had learned from their history the futility of attempting to settle disputes through mass murder. They developed civilized methods of conflict resolution like fair court systems. They restrained themselves from mass murder in ways that are completely unknown to the subhumans who came to these cities from the disfunctional lands with the intention of genocidal slaughter.

    The resulting actions after suffering horrible murder by the citizens of London, Madrid, and New York against the peoples who come from disfunctional cultures are not racist or discriminatory, but reasonable and rational acts of self-defense from the people who come to their cities with the intent of murder. It is sad that the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples who came to the great cities of civilization in order to escape from the madness of disfuctional societies suffer in the West due to the actions of monsters.

    But, it is the responsibility of the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples from the disfuctional lands to seperate the monsters from their own society when they arrive in the civilized world. If the civilized people of a foreign culture can not or will not isolate and neutralize the monsters who live in their community, then they all will bear responsibility for the crimes that these monsters commit against the rest of the citizens. The entire community will suffer. That is the way that the world works.

  The citizens of the cities that have suffered from the crimes that subhumans commit are not responsible for their inability to tell monsters from civilized people among those have come to their cities from distant lands.

And the Difference is?

How is outsourcing any different from sub contracting within your own country in this respect? Quoth the article:

We didn't stop doing business in New York City or London after similar incidents

Quite.

Re:And the Difference is?

FTA: Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers?

In addition to your comment, not only did we not quit doing business in New York and London, but we didn't even change the way we do business. It is nearly five years after the Sept 11 attacks and most businesses still have no disaster recovery plan of their own. Does anyone seriously think that these same companies are concerned about whether their outsourced partners have such a plan? Sure, the companies that were in the WTC and lost huge amounts of people and equipment have probably laid out some plans. Some other people have probably been wise and seen the mistakes of others and laid their own plans. But largely, nobody has done anything to change they way of doing business. (Remember the proverb that says: "A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.")

Re:And the Difference is?

The last 3 companies I worked for, and 2 orginizations I am involved with all have disater recovery plans. Every large company I know of has somewhere in the building a really large 3 ring binder filled with plans on what to do in case of flood, fire, chemical spill, tornado, etc. The what to do not only covers immediate response but also steps to recovery. One company I worked for even had plans in case of a nuclear attack (but I think it was drafted during the cold war and no one saw a reason to eliminate it).

Think about your choices

Why do we always outsource to places that are stuck in eternal struggles. Seriously, when was the last time Iceland or New Zeland had some terrorist plot or civil war ensue.

Re:Think about your choices

Because life is cheap in those places, and therefore so is business.

Corollary: Business puts a low value on human existence.

Re:Think about your choices

Corollary: Business puts a low value on human existence.

Which is why we should be against buisness, and for giving more power to the state. Because if there is anything that Mao, Stalin, Chowchesku, Pol Pot, Hitler, Castro (and insert any other socialist dictator of your choice) have tought us, is that when you eliminate private buisness then you have a blossoming of human rights and value of human life it truly appreciated.

Yeah, and never mind that Iceland and New Zealand are amoung the most unrestricted free-market economies in the world! And that free-markets are a relatively new and still limited in India and China, which were pretty much hardcore Socialist until the last few years. Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that the people are easily exploited in India and China because of the desperate poverty created by years of mismanaged central planning, forced labour, or rigid caste system - it is all those evil evil evil buisnessmen!

If only we were valued as much as the people in buisness-free North Korea! We can only dream!

Telecom, process, geographical diversification

Three considerations, IMO, outweigh the rest:

* Telecom infrastructure
* Work process
* Geographical diversification

You need reliable telecom infrastructure for obvious reasons. You need good work processes for backup and the like, but even more so that if you lose the people on a project, somebody else can step in and at least understand what needs to be done. And you need geographical diversification so that, if worst comes to worst, there IS somebody else to step in.

To the extent you have those three, outsourcing or otherwise doing business in unstable places can be a smart risk to take. If not, you can be very badly exposed.

Err...

So this article is basically saying "they just bombed a company, do you think our sources are OK?!"?

Moral bankruptcy

Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?

That's seems about on a par with worrying about doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald because they had an office located in the World Trade Center.

And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.

Re:Moral bankruptcy

Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?

Yes. Specifically, they are people who have the responsibility to prevent or otherwise deal with IT outages.

The people who think the only moral thing to do in a crisis is to be emotionally overwrought are of no use to anyone when a crisis occurs. You can go sit in a closet and cry while the rest of us solve problems for the people who didn't get killed.

Bullshit

All major American, and certain European cities are under the threat of bombs, and not just normal bombs at that. You have the first world luxury of choosing from biological, chemical, nuclear and neurotic weapons. So why don't people speak about the threat to all technological and commercial sourcing?

So why the fuck is the bombing in Mumbai so important to /.? Are you all softbellies scared of getting outsourced?

Mark me flamebait, lazy overpaid supremacist!

-clueless

Sorry they got bombed - can I have my job back

I trained my Indian replacement and found out later that she was working for 20% of my wage. Bring the jobs back home.

Silly

Come of folks. So the world's largest democratic country with the world's largest population of English speaking citizens has one city bombed and the US is going to rethink its direction to outsource technology workers there? Nope!

In fact, many of the export centers are not in the city center and were unaffected by this event. Knowing many Indians, those that were will be back up and running in no time flat no matter what it takes.

Now, there may be reasons to rethink outsourcing such as low productivity, higher costs, poor quality of work, and customer relation issues but this is not one of them.

The best wishes of many people in the US go out to every Indian and we stand in solidarity with the many many millions of peace loving, free citizens of that nation.

*sigh*

My first reaction to this was "I wonder how this will affect IT outsourcing?"

My second reaction was shame that that should be my first reaction, when I have friends and colleagues with family there.

Personally, I don't think this should have a practical impact on outsourcing decisions. India is a stable democracy; war may stir ethnic and religious resentment, but I don't see things changing overnight in a way that affects business. And even at intolerable levels, terrorist attacks have almost no actuarial significance.

On the other hand, China is frightening. It's not longer precisely accurate to call it a totalitarian state, but politically it is still a one party, non-democratic state. Mature democracies have a kind of dynamic stability, where individuals and parties change, but politics and policy don't shift that dramatically. Systems based on the authority of a single group may be superficially stable, but they are vulnerable to individuals or groups of individuals being replaced, or even just changing their minds. Put the nation under stress, and you could well have an ultra-ideological hard liner becoming supreme leader.

how can you rate the loss of a human life?

Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers?
yeah ! Let's make a back up of our chief engineer's brain, just in case he gets blown to pieces, you insensitive clod!

What crap!

Yea... I am from India and this is the worst kind of FUD I have seen. Terrorist attacks form a much smaller risk then fire, floods and other hazards. A city capable of dealing with those can pretty much handle any such terrorist emergencies. This article is pure FUD.

And this will mean what, exactly?

The question is what you can do to not be affected by such an event. Move back to the homeland, as no doubt a lot of politicians would like you to? Those places aren't safe from these attacks. Move your business to a deserted island in the Pacific? The next tsunami might be just around the corner (you know those once-in-a-thousand-years things don't stick to schedule). There is no safe place anywhere, so get disaster recovery plans on the way and actually test them occasionally. And keep your data backup in a different location.

The thing is that no company is going to move out of India because of this. The labour is still so cheap in comparison that they can afford the loss of machinery and, as cynical as it sounds, training new employees to fill the empty slots still costs less than constantly paying first world wages. The gains outweigh the risks on this.

conflict between Israel and Lebanon ???

"conflict between Israel and Lebanon" -- WTF? This should read "Israeli attack on Lebanon."

Security=cost of doing business

Security is one of the reasons why the US has a successful economy. If you are looking to open a business, are you going to do it where there are drug dealers and gangs on every corner and you need an armed security team 24/7? Of course not! You are going to open your business where you employees can make it to and from work safely.

The same can be said for a country. Right now, I'm willing to be there are not a whole lot of companies looking to open shops up in N Korea, Lebanon, Iran and Syria.

Stable governments are another factor. You don't need a MBA to know that what happened to white owned farms in S Africa could just as easily happen to your call center.

So while businesses may need to pay more to an American employee (or employee from any developed country), it is as much an investment in security as it is in the employees themselves.

That's my 2 pesos anyway.

What will India do?

That is really what is at stake. Does India have what it takes to invade and occupy a country, any country, as a demonstration to their citizens and the world that they will not tolerate terror?

How does a country assure the world that it is working to make itself safe from terror? Has the Bush administration made the U.S. safe from terror by channeling Homeland Security money to Indiana Amish popcorn factories instead of container-by-container port inspection?

Not terrorism, infrastructure

Having looked at the posts, I feel everyone has concentrated on the terrorism risks of outsourcing. But for me the far more important risks when shifting work overseas are those that are non-political.
For instance, if you are moving your call centre overseas (albeit you would probably be the last company to do so). Can you trust that the telecom downtime will be negligable?
Or for any type of business. Is the local power supply reliable?

Both of the above examples are not simgle massive event but constant issues and be massively damaging to mantaining custom.
IMHO those are the types of concern that outsourcers should be taking into account when moving abroad.

Having said that I imagine that labour is pretty cheap in the Gaza Strip right now, but I dont think many companies will be moving in at the moment.

simple economics

if you think about it, this would make outsourcing cheaper. since the risks have increased, the prices will be reduced. i can see dollar signs in every fat, white, american middle-manager's eyes. people getting bombed in some third world shithole is a non-issue because they can be replaced so easily

"Outsourcing community"??

Dude, what the hell is "outsourcing community"? I mean, we have Mac-communities, that have people who use Macs. We have Linux-communities, where people use Linux. We have things like gay and lesbian-communities, where people are of certain sexual orientation. Then what is "outsourcing community"? A group of people who... outsource?

Maybe they should outsource their community?

Run for the Hills!

One in 5,000,000 Indians were killed last week in train bombings. That means that you should review your disaster recovery plans.

But wait: One in 2,600,000 Americans die each and every day in automobile accidents! That can only mean we need to prepare for Armageddon!

The High Costs of Muslim Populations

Just another example of the high costs- physical, economic, psychic- of having a large Muslim population in your midst. Israel suffers from it for dispossesing the Palestinian people- mainly the Muslim flotsam and jetsam of imperial Turkey, resettled in Judea from Egypt, Circassia, and the Balkans during the Ottoman Empire's slow-motion collapse. Yet what of India, the victim of 1400 years of continual jihad aggression during which millions of Hindus were slaughtered or enslaved, tens of thousands of temples and monuments destroyed, and in the modern age two large sections of it carved out to make homelands for its invaders? Yet what did it do to deserve this enemy from without (Pakistan and to a lesser extent Bangladesh) and within (150 million Indian Muslim "citizens") besides succumbing in the end to continuous jihad aggression? And why are Western countries voluntarily replicating the same conditions for themselves by allowing millions of Third World Muslim colonist-invaders into their midsts?

What I think...

Putting aside emotional reactions which would cause me to make comments like: "people are dying and yet you are thinking about IT infrastructures"... (I am an Indian, and have lots of relatives and friends in Mumbai). I know that life went on after the blasts. I know that the big IT companies in India are world leaders when it comes to having processes and procedures concerning their business. (I am in the IT industry myself). In my experience, most of the clients that I have worked with have had little or no processes themselves. So, it is unfair to think of this in a light where India (the country being out-sourced to) needs to have back-up plans, and disaster recovery procedures. Anyway, I think that the whole world is fair game for terrorist activities (terrorists being what they are), so we should be discussing about these procedures, plans, etc. at a global level. - Vaibhav

This is silly...

No area that has an educated population sufficient to outsource activities to, is guaranteed to be free of civil strife.

The only thing this might show is that you should never put all of your outsourcing eggs into a single basket. You need to spread them around.

Re:Just another rant against outsourcing

For your information a state of civil war is raging for over 20-30 years in its punjab region,

For your information, no.

Punjab did have a violent separatist movement in the 1980s. That's history now. There's far more separatist violence in Corsica or the Basque country. Or Quebec.

Re:Just another rant against outsourcing

Governments are not idiot as to put silicon valleys, industrial centers in regions that are prone to any problems. But outsourcing enemies are idiot as to use every single shit for ranting against outsourcing.

um...no...isn't Silicon Valley somewhat dangerously close to a little thing called the San Andreas Fault?

Humans are often in a state of wishful thinking and denial, and property developers are a special breed of snake oil salesmen - people build homes and industry in earthquake zones, near active volcanoes and on flood plains all the time, and have done so for millennia.

Re:Just another rant against outsourcing

The Punjab crisis was over before the Internet was commercialized.

Re:Just another rant against outsourcing

For your information a state of civil war is raging for over 20-30 years in its punjab region

That's false. The last time an act of terrorism happened there ("there" = Indian Punjab) was in 1995. Since then there have been no terrorist incidents. The separatist movement was long dead even before that.

Riiight...

It's still a damn concern. If you're placing work there, shouldn't it be relatively stable?

The only reason it's risen to this position in the IT industry is that they're adequate in
many situations and they're cheap. No concerns whatsoever were being applied to whether or
not the whole project would go up in flames because of a terrorist bombing over there or not.

Sure, it can happen here. It can happen anywhere, in all honesty, so long as there's people
willing to commit terroristic acts. It's just that it's slightly less likely to happen here
in the States and a few other relatively stable places right now. Outsourcing isn't about
business, per se, it's about greed and trying to eke out the very last dollar to show profitability
to the Street, LSE and other places like it.

It's no more sustainable than strip mining is. And considerations about how easy it would
be for someone to do this should be factored in, right along with the risks of IP theft,
confidential data leakage, etc. But very few doing the outsourcing stuff think of anything
but that bottom line cost- I know, I've seen it repeatedly. And it's very disturbing. I've
a client with some important financial services software that went and had his Java codebase
for the program "cleaned up" by a Russian firm. For all I know, they did a good job, but
since the nature of the program requires a trusted state, much like any system handling
classified data, the codebase in it's entirity is going to require an audit for backdoors, etc.
He is going to spend roughly 2/3rds of his "savings" in paying me to go back through and
audit the codebase for security reasons- IF he's lucky, it will be all he'll spend on this
escipade. I'm betting that there will be things that will positively need to be re-worked
as they almost always do in these outsource projects. This will mean a net loss
over what he'd have spent just contracting with a company with a security bond, accreditation,
etc.

For many things, offshoring doesn't make any sense whatsoever. This is not to say that it
is precluded or that they can't produce usable results. It's that people keep seeing those
dollars "saved" and never once looking at what the consequences that are also associated
with that price. It's damned well about time that we all do.

Re:My wife....

It's not racist to want to be able to actually understand the dialect being spoken. Big companies should get a clue and realise that the US is so large that regional accents evolved, and automatically route incoming calls based on geography/area code to a *regional* call center staffed by regional dialect speaking persons. This is just normal common sense.

    Customers call up when they already have a problem that needs to be fixed, so they are not amused immediately, then, right off the bat this is what happens :

1)the customer gets someone named "Mike" who really isn't named Mike, so that annoys the customer because they know they have just been *lied to*(this is supposed to instill confidence and respect?)by the company, and...

2) there IS a language barrier as the conversation goes on, so trying to diffuse an annoyed customer with a problem and analyse this problem one might think that clear and easy to understand-for both parties-speech would be the proper move. It should be a priority, not a cost cutting measure.

    Short term it might not be the cheapest, longer term it is the way to happier customers, those folks you want repeat business from. Now if "Mike" can pull off changing dialects easily as he transits between a host of customers-more power to him, it's hard enough being a native born USian to do this and carry on a satisfactory two way conversation sometimes.

No one in the US wants the outside the border folks to not have jobs, that isn't the issue at all, the issue is they are starting to get fried that domestic jobs that still need to be done (non buggywhip jobs, even if low balled in the economy) are shipped away, then when you need to access this service it is far from a satisfactory experience for a lot of people.

These are legitimate problems, that acctually could be fixed, but that would impact the "bottom line" of some already rich people and some middleman wealth skimmers.