These days, there is certainly no shortage of debate on the relative merits or evils of Offshore outsourcing. One thing's for sure: Offshore outsourcing will continue to increase over the next several years. Close to 500,000 American IT jobs have already been lost since 2001, many of them to Offshore outsourcing.
An unspoken corporate lemming behavior will continue to fuel this growth for years to come. When industry leaders such as GE, DuPont, Citibank, GM or Procter & Gamble do something, others take notice and many will follow. CIOs cannot single-handedly reverse the forces moving U.S. jobs overseas. While I'd love to see thousands of CIOs come together as a united bloc to influence IT-related policy matters, the sad reality is we don't have a clear, unified voice right now. Therefore, I strongly encourage CIOs to rise above the "religious fervor" and focus on the things they can control in order to ensure the best possible outcomes for their companies, their IT organizations and the U.S. IT industry.
