Elliot Kass

The most vociferous objections to offshore outsourcing come from developers and other IT professionals who feel that their jobs are threatened. What they might not realize is the extent to which they can mitigate the effect by taking advantage of the new career paths that globalization is creating.

Meta Group Inc. analyst Michael Doane sees far reaching implications for the global sourcing approach. He says implementing large-scale enterprise applications, such as ERP and CRM, can be done to great advantage using a combination of onshore and offshore resources. As an example, he says the global energy company British Petroleum PLC (BP) reduced the cost of a corporate-wide SAP AG implementation by 30 per cent using this strategy.

At Nielsen Media Research Inc., the TV and radio audience measurement company, offshore outsourcing plays a part in nearly every link of the product chain. But it's not the whole chain.