INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE UK GLOBALIZATION: THE OUTSOURCING OF UK JOBS

INTORDUCTION (DESCRIPTION) Over the Past 5-8 years the UK IT jobs sector has seen a vast trend of the out sourcing and offshoring primarily all linked to its 1st and 2nd support based roles. The decision to source IT to an overseas firm (offshoring) is frequently looked at in simple economic terms it is cheaper. In Practice, however, offshoring is fraught with difficulties. As well as the considerable challenge of controlling projects at a distance, there are difference in culture, language, business method, politics, and many other issues to contend with. Nevertheless as many firms has discovered, the benefits of getting it right are too great to ignore. (Carmel, E. Tija P2005) This report will be a detailed discussion regarding how UK jobs have been relocated to Middle Eastern shores to countries such as India, which to date is classed as the worlds 4 th largest economy yet 10 years ago India was only known for being a third world country. A vast number of job roles that have been relocated abroad are all affiliated and related with Teleworking and can be classed and first and second line support roles. (First and second support roles are usually linked and associated with first University graduates that are looking to start their careers with Information Technology Support or Information Systems Support) however more recently large multinational organizations have all been outsourcing there IT needs to foreign countries such as India. The jobs themselves have not left UK shores but foreign national qualified to do the jobs have been brought in to do the work and fill in any roles available leaving UK workers without jobs and insufficient training, leading to a shortage of skills within the UK market.

GLOBALIZATION The Term Globalization has no definitive description associated with it; the term is thrown into context depending in who is using the term and how it relates to the subject area as the description and findings by one individual may differ to the description and finding another. Globalization is a daily reality for many companies in specified sectors of the economy. Within many sectors, the terms of competition have indeed shifted from being primarily local or regional to global. (A Turner, 2001) OUT SOURCING Juntiwasarakij. S(2008) The trend of firms pursing out sourcing practice will be growing as long as they can still obtain substantial profit, thus, sustain their position in the compertitive markets In context the IT industry has vastly and promptly taken advantage of the exceedingly common tendency to outsource business Operations. During 2005 Juntiwasarakij, S, (2008) had reported that the leading 100 IT organizations had spent a total nearing $70billion (39billion) pursing Outsourced work of their business Operations. OFFSHORING Olsen, K.B (2006), states Contracting out business activities to foreign providers, or what has come to be called offshoring, has been under taken for decades. As such, offshoring is not as recent a phenomenon as the impression one may draw from its current attention in the public media. The phenomenon, however, appears to have entered into a new stage with offshoring of services becoming increasingly important. This change in structure has been underway for some time, and is generally attributed to the interplay between three factors: technology advances, economic and competitive pressures to reduce costs and improve productivity, and institutional developments favoring trade liberalization. To understand the term Offshoring efficiently the term outsource has to be analyzed. Outsourced has been defined as organizations selling or purchasing aspects of their business operations to third party organizations for variety of different reasons, of which the most common being the reduction of business costs. Offshoring is directly related to Outsourcing as in many occasions it involves purchasing of selling services to organizations based on external shores (foreign shores). TELEWORKING Teleworkers and Telework are terms commonly associated with outsourcing and offshoring amongst the collating term Globalization due to the sectors of work they fall into. Johnson, M (1997) Teleworking is not new. Any sales representative serving a remote corner of any region or country, selling his or her wares and calling in the orders to a distant production facility, is most definitions a teleworker.

Teleworking Association (2009) defines Teleworking as work that is being carried out at a significant distance away from the traditional office desk. The distance itself can be from home or even abroad. Teleworkers usually have a variety of different roles associated to them however in a majority of cases most are IT associated.