Setting the Offshoring/Outsourcing record straight

Ted Strickland is Governor of the American state of Ohio. Governor Strickland has recently issued an executive order banning the use of federal funds for outsourcing.

Ted. Check your facts. You meant to say offshoring, or at least offshore outsourcing, but the text all the way through the executive order reads that federal outsourcing is banned. Outsourcing does not mean jobs vanishing to India. Governor, check your facts.

Does this mean that the office cleaning companies sweeping up trash left by the federal employees of the Ohio state must now find new business elsewhere? Or the electricians and plumbers fixing problems in Ohio school and government buildings need to become government employees? Or the management consultants brought in to advise on policy decisions… wait a moment.

The intentions of the governor are clear, but how could his office have allowed an executive order of this magnitude to have been signed and published with such a basic error?

It reminds me of when the British government issued an order banning protestors directly in front of the parliament building – for security reasons of course – only to realize that the new legislation applied to future protests, not retrospectively. Brian Haw has now been protesting opposite the gates of parliament since 2001 and he continues to live there, because he was already in place when the new order became law.

The state of Ohio must certainly be outsourcing some services. I haven’t called them to check, but I’d be delighted to speak to a representative of the governor’s office to confirm my assumption. There is no way that every cleaner, mailroom clerk, window cleaner, or plumber is employed directly by the state.

And this is a constant battle and confusion over outsourcing, particularly in the world of IT.

Think about how IT staff used to be hired. A bank, or a retailer, or an electricity firm needed some IT support. They hired people in with the appropriate skills, and those IT teams worked on a single project for a single company using a single technology.

Now it is far less common for a major bank or retailer to employ a large retained team of IT professionals. Not because it’s cheaper to hire them in from a specialist IT firm – though it might well be – but because they get better skills and more flexibility by working with a professional IT services company. I was speaking today to a senior government IT director and he suggested that some of his internal team are just ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ because he can’t keep them trained on every new technology the department needs – he just has to hope they are up to date enough.

Many IT professionals are better off, in career terms, working for a specialist IT firm where they get exposure to different clients, projects, and technologies – plus as much training as they need to keep on top of changing technologies.

But this is just a microcosm of the changing world of work.

And the world is changing. The governor of Ohio is wrong to order that the state should never purchase any service or product from overseas. Ohio has some fine people, but they surely cannot have a monopoly on every possible expertise the state government needs.

Why not draft a policy that favors locally sourced services, but allows the use of offshore services where it makes sense for the taxpayers in Ohio? Not just in terms of reducing the tax dollars spent, but by working with partners who can improve the government service to citizens. It should be a case-by-case decision that takes into account where services will be delivered.