ABSTRACT
In contrast to the political backlash, research on offshore IT sourcing has found positive effects on U.S. IT jobs, IT productivity, IT costs, and IT quality.3 For example, Forrester estimates that 360,000 U.S. service jobs went abroad in 2003; however, these jobs represented only 1/4 of one percent of the U.S. workforce, which is 130 million people strong.4 The Cato Institute argues that offshoring low-paying IT jobs will create newer and higher-paying IT jobs in the U.S. over the next eight years. Similarly, global production of IT hardware reduced hardware costs by 30%, resulting in an additional $230 billion in U.S. GDP between 1995 and 2002. Similar effects on productivity are anticipated in software development.5 Finally, an IBM Consulting Services survey found that 82% of IT managers reported cost savings between 10% and 50% from offshore sourcing and 68% of the respondents claimed some or significant quality improvement.6
