Offshore Sourcing Trends

According to a recent CNN/Money analysis, as painful as the labor market has been lately, what's even more painful is that many of the 2.5 million jobs lost in the past few years are never coming back.

By 2004, more than 80 percent of U.S. executive boardrooms will have discussed offshore sourcing, and more than 40 percent of U.S. enterprises will have completed some type of pilot or will be sourcing IT (information technology) services," Gartner Inc. (IT: Research, Estimates), a technology consulting firm, said in a study late last year.

U.S. businesses, battered by the recent three-year bear market in stocks and an economy struggling to find its footing, have already developed a taste for super-cheap labor in developing countries, where workers are increasingly better-trained -- especially if they've spent significant time working in the United States on temporary visas.

A February survey of 145 U.S. companies by consultant Forrester Research found that 88 percent of the firms that look overseas for services claimed to get better value for their money offshore while 71 percent said offshore workers did better quality work.

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