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March 23, 2005

Globalization

Recently, I had the opportunity to provide a metadata tutorial to an academic conference where the welcome speech touched on the impact of globalization. The speaker indicated that the erosion of jobs within the Information Technology community could be fixed by simply increase the supply and quality of students within computer science or any related field. Fueling this perception are article after article telling us the same thing.

The economic rise of Asia’s giants is the most important story of our age. It heralds the end, in the not too distant future, of as much as five centuries of domination by the Europeans and their colonial offshoots Martin Wolf (Financial Times)

There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore. - Carly Fiorina (HP)

Currently, India is becoming the back office of the world. Everest estimates companies all over the globe are sending as much as $5 billion in work to Indian outsourcing service providers. But all the headlines about the Indian success story are obscuring a development that can have just as much impact. I predict China will be the next big wave in offshore outsourcing. – Todd Furnis

Income Confers No Immunity as Jobs Migrate – USA Today

The world has arrived at a rare strategic inflection point where nearly half its population—living in China, India and Russia—have been integrated into the global market economy, many of them highly educated workers, who can do just about any job in the world. We’re talking about three billion people. – Craig Barrett (Intel)

Ok, you get the idea that plenty of people believe that we are entering into a new world of work where the globalization of labor, capital, and innovation will take center stage for years to come. However if we step back a feet, we can see another perspective where history paints a different picture. Globalization is clearly in the early stages of hitting the white collar world and especially the upper and middle layers of the organization. But globalization is not the predominant reason we have job erosion. Globalization is only the tip of the iceberg; the vast majority of reasons revolve around the fact that we have been very good at what we are doing. Automation, reuse, standardization, communications, and abundance of talented individuals is the real reason we need less and less information workers.

Posted by Todd at March 23, 2005 12:55 PM