ABSTRACT
In June 2010 Hewlett Packard (HP), one of the world’s largest manufacturers of information technology (IT) equipment and a leading provider of software solutions and IT services, announced that it had plans for a series of new investments in automation technology for its enterprise service division, which would make it possible to standardize and consolidate 100 HP data centres worldwide. According to HP this would, over the course of a few years, result in an estimated 9,000 jobs being eliminated; this, it was emphasized, would mark HP’s transition away from the standard practice of outsourcing back-office jobs to other countries, towards a new way of leveraging technology to perform the back-office tasks much more efficiently (Ford, 2010).
