Off-shoring is much more than "SW-Factories"
In Spain it's very common to associate the concept of "off-shoring" with that of "SW-Factories". While these have much in common, offshoring offers a whole world of additional benefits.
The SW-Factory service has been around in Spain for many years. The factories have delivered benefits in the form of lower costs and higher quality, mostly from the "industrialization" of processes and the standardisation of tasks, which allows the use of lower-cost resources to perform the repetitive parts of the SW life cycle. The cost benefit has recently increased further by the use of off-shore locations especially in Latin-America.
However, there is much more to "off-shoring" than industrialisation and labour arbitrage. Although these two benefits drove the initial growth of off-shoring, increasingly corporations in USA, UK and the North of Europe are reaping strategic benefits by trusting more important parts of their businesses to global service providers.
- ACCESS TO THE BEST GLOBAL RESOURCES - unlike incumbent vendors with a vested interest in staffing their large pools of local resources with local experience, global off-shore providers staff the same resources that have worked in the prime global corporations in their industry and area of specialisation.
- ACCESS TO GLOBAL BEST-PRACTICES AND BUSINESS PROCESSES - these resources bring in the expertise from the prime companies in their field. A banking professional from a global off-shore provider is likely to have finished just days ago an assignment in a leading Wall-Street bank, or a leading London securities house. This global experience is a much welcome complement to the local experience from incumbent vendors
- INNOVATION DRIVEN BY DIVERSITY - although it takes some getting used-to, working with people with different cultural background and work practices, and in other languages like English, can unleash the creativity and innovation much needed currently in the industry in Spain
