Offshore outsourcing can be a great opportunity for a company to hire additional staff while saving money and distributing the workload among more professionals. However, this practice also has many drawbacks, and it can pose potential risks to the project’s success and safety. When deciding whether to employ offshore outsourcing, the company should consider the task’s characteristics as well as its current resources and staff availability.
First of all, some projects deal with highly sensitive data, and its improper or unsafe distribution can lead to major ethical problems for the business. As Reynolds (2018) notes, the company should analyze the political repercussions of such incidents when deciding who gets access to information. Moreover, small projects or those that do not require many programmers can be done by local employees. Second, one must take into account that outsourcing internationally has additional costs for finding and hiring workers. Hiring international workers may lead to unnecessary spending if the business deals with small assignments and does not have a large budget.
In contrast, large complex projects may benefit from offshore outsourcing. For example, the company wants to develop a product that requires constant programmer support or goes through many iterations. International employees can work at any time, creating an unending stream of new information. Moreover, large projects with short deadlines can also be supported by a bigger number of outsourced specialists. Here, the issues to consider are time, budget, the need for more workers, and support requirements.
Overall, companies need to consider many factors when offshore outsourcing for their programming needs. The project’s size and budget are top concerns as they can help determine whether hiring outside of the country is worth it. The firm’s management should also look at its outsourcing ability when dealing with customer or product information. For example, large projects often require more employees, while smaller products and simple services do not need to be outsourced.
Reference
Reynolds G. W. (2018). Ethics in information technology (6th ed.). Cengage Learning.