Out with outsourcing? Jobs coming back to USA!!!

[Omaha Steve]

http://nwitimes.com/articles/2007/08/12/business/business/doccf453a582e31d2d38625733300612318.txt

BY KEITH BENMAN
[email protected]
219.933.3326

Two years ago, Fortune 500 energy company NiSource Inc., of Merrillville, announced it would be cutting more than 1,000 jobs after inking a $1.6 billion outsourcing agreement with IBM.

Five months ago, NiSource quietly told employees that financing and accounting jobs outsourced to IBM were coming back to NiSource because "some results had fallen short of expectations."

In late 2006, telecom giant AT&T announced that 2,000 jobs previously outsourced both domestically and overseas would be added to AT&T's payroll. In July, AT&T delivered on that pledge in Indiana with the opening of a new 425-employee DSL computer call center in Indianapolis.

"Customers need a good experience when they come to us," AT&T Indiana President George Fleetwood said last month. "We are very much in a competitive environment."

Global tides wash jobs out, in

In recent years, a long list of prominent companies, including Sears Roebuck & Co., Dell Computers, and J.P. Morgan Chase have ended or scaled back outsourcing agreements, resulting in thousands of jobs being brought back in-house. In many cases, those jobs are coming back from overseas.

The phenomena of "insourcing" or "backsourcing" is picking up steam in corporate America, as companies become more selective about which job functions to outsource and which to keep, according to Jeffrey Kaplan, a senior consultant at Cutter Consortium, in Arlington, Mass.


FULL story at link.

[Deja Q]

1. This is excellent news!

Use people for their strengths and everyone can prosper. Globalization should be about everybody. And one can't reprogram a culture overnight.

[acmavm]

2. They got what they paid for. Cheap labor and crappy work. When will

the US government bring back the jobs they outsourced? Like jobs for the IRS?

[Yael]

4. Please tell me this is a joke

Is my head that far in the sand? We OUTSOURCED IRS jobs?

[acmavm]

6. They were gonna do it but part of he plan got deep sixed in 2006.

But then part of the problem resolution service was to go to someplace called IAP. Anyhow, read both these articles and explain it to me. Something got outsources. And the IRS has no right to outsource ANYTHING. Oh yeah, read the second one where the IRS was planning to sell your personnel data to other companies. I can't find out if they ever went through with that or not.

Someone smarter than me in regard to the IRS needs to help me here.

IRS No To Outsourcing
This didn’t sound right from the start so when the plan was shelved, you probably had the urge to say, “I told you so”. Those not in the know, let me update you: The Internal Revenue Service has decided to shelve a plan that would have seen it outsource the management and maintenance of more than 100,000 desktop computers at facilities across the nation to a private contractor.
An IRS spokesman explained that this would be a huge and complex undertaking and hence they’d decided to pull back. The IRS had been in preliminary talks with technology vendors about the plan but no deals had been signed. Informationweek.com reports:
The halting of the plan is unrelated to the fact that the IRS has a poor track record when it comes to managing large outsourcing projects, the spokesman insists. In the most recent foul up, the agency issued more than $318 million in refunds on phony returns last year because of a botched software project, a government report released earlier this year
http://www.blogsource.org/2006/12/index.html

________________________________________________________________________
or maybe not...

The IRS is also delaying the implementation of a separate plan to outsource the handling of paper tax returns to a contractor. Under a revised plan, the tax agency will reduce from seven to two the number of processing centers that will be handed off to IAP Worldwide Services by December. IAP is now scheduled to take control of the remaining centers in June.

The calendar played a big part in the IRS's decision to slow the implementation. "The January to April tax season is prime time for us, and we didn't want any interruptions," the spokesman says. The IRS's deal with IAP is worth $103 million over five years. The agency expects the plan to result in total savings of $25 million to $30 million, the spokesman says.

http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196600510

And who might one of those mystery companies be?
According to InformationWeek, one was Computer Sciences Corporation, but IAP had its fingers in a nearby pie as well. link

The Internal Revenue Service is shelving a plan to outsource to a private contractor the management and maintenance of more than 100,000 desktop computers at offices across the country.

The IRS says halting the plan is unrelated to its poor track record for managing large outsourcing. "We realized that this would be a huge and complex undertaking, and we've decided to pull back," says a spokesman. The IRS had been in preliminary talks with vendors, but no deals had been signed.

The IRS has reason to pause. In its most recent foul-up, the agency issued more than $318 million in refunds on phony returns last year because of a botched software project that had been outsourced to Computer Sciences Corp., a government report released earlier this year concluded.

The IRS also is delaying a separate plan to outsource the handling of paper tax returns to a contractor. Under a revised plan, the tax agency is reducing from seven to two the number of processing centers handed off to IAP Worldwide Services by December. IAP is now scheduled to take control of the remaining centers in June. "The January to April tax season is prime time for us, and we didn't want any interruptions," the spokesman says. The IRS's deal with IAP is valued at $103 million over five years, and the agency expects savings of $25 million to $30 million."

And you may - or may not - recall that last year the IRS was planning to allow tax preparers to sell taxpayer information.

It also had problems with lack of security for its on-line debt payment system.

http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=1367
______________________________________________________________________

Hell, I don't know what they've done, and I can't find out who IAP is.
And I've looked.

[Yael]

7. Oh -- I gotcha. Their tech support.

IAP World Services: http://www.iapws.com/

These are the people who farm out tech support to Indian call centers for companies who can't (won't) manage their own data support and customer service.

Why can't the government just open the Department of Government Programming and hire a few top notch programmers to write their own applications? Hell, they could even include the SubDepartment of Government Hardware and give jobs to all of those MCSEs that graduated from DeVry over the last 10 years who thought they would be in 6 figures right now but find themselves asking the all critical "do you want fries with that" question instead.

</rant>

[acmavm]

9. Yep. But the part of that pissed me off was outsourcing their 'problem

resolution department'. And did you notice that the IRS felt entitled to sell off private information that it gathered from tax processing to companies?

And who is IAP that was going to get the problem resolution departments, just two instead of what, eight? Are they an American company? Who owns thems? Are they selling our info?

[Yael]

10. It appears that they are a Halliburton lite

American owned, specializing in war profiteering and tech support to the military (from their 'about us').

I am still looking for information about selling information.

Can you just imagine -- we finally get UHC and as a thank you to the lobbyists for "allowing" it to go through -- it immediately gets privatized to the Halliburton/IAPWS of the world?

*shakes head*

[Yael]

3. Aaaaaaand its coming back to bite them all

They send the jobs overseas, people get pissed off with customer service issues, then they have to spend ~twice as much to hire and train new people in the US than they would have had to do if they just left things alone in the first place.

I love it. :D

[GOPBasher]

5. Much of the reason is ...

the depressed wages here in the US, which makes labor costs closer in line with those developing nations. Also, the dollar has been coming down in value. I'm glad jobs are coming back, but we should be clear about all the reasons.

Example: I have a manufacturing job, right here in the US, but I make all of $9.50/hr.

[Yael]

8. I know that Dell has stated

That the extreme reports of poor customer service are what is driving them to return.

Not sure what the deal is on the manufacturing front though.