IT workers hit hardest by offshore outsourcing, survey finds

Jobs most at risk for offshore outsourcing are computer programming, development

As many as 8% of IT workers have been displaced by offshore outsourcing, either through job loss or an involuntary transfer to a new job by their employer, which is twice the rate of workers in other occupations, according to a study based on data collected from some 10,000 people, which may be the largest survey of its kind.

The survey, conducted by researchers at the New York University Stern School of Business and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, also backs up the long-standing view that IT employees in purely technical jobs -- computer programmers and software developers who have little customer interaction -- are at the most risk from offshore outsourcing.

The broad conclusions are unlikely to surprise many high-tech workers, but what may make this offshore outsourcing study unique is its breadth: some 6,700 workers across a variety of occupations and more than 3,000 hiring managers and human resources professionals were surveyed.

There has been a dearth of data about the impact of offshore outsourcing on U.S. workers, and its authors, Prasanna Tambe of the Stern School and Lorin Hitt of Wharton, said their work is the first to pin down offshore outsourcing's impact by occupation.

The job site Careerbuilder.com funded the research, which looked at a spectrum of occupations, including technology, and published initial data from the survey in April. But the 44-page paper, posted this week on the Social Science Research Network (registration required) analyzes what the data is saying about the fate of high-tech workers who have been directly affected by offshore outsourcing.

Tambe, an assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences at NYU, said the data isn't a forecast of how extensive offshore outsourcing will be, but instead tries to fill in the gaps of the theoretical work on offshore outsourcing and address the dearth of data on this topic.

But the impact of offshore outsourcing on IT jobs may just be a sign of how this trend will unfold across a broad range of occupations. "I think [IT] is definitely ahead of the curve, but I think that gap will probably close in the future," Tambe said.

The base rate of offshoring across all industries is just over 15%, but some 40% of all tech and telecommunications companies are doing some type of offshore work, according to the research.

By occupation, more than 30% of the survey respondents said they are offshoring computer programming and software development jobs, but only about half, or 15.5%, reported offshoring systems analysts, who typically interact more with others in a business.

Among employees, across all occupations, slightly more than 4% of workers were displaced because of offshore outsourcing, half the rate of IT workers. The survey's 8% figure for IT displacement represents the percentage of workers who have ever been affected by offshore outsourcing, a rate that implies an annual offshoring-related displacement of 1% to 2% per year for IT workers, according to the study.

Of those displaced by offshore outsourcing, 70% lost their jobs, with older workers more likely to be displaced.

The researchers don't predict what future displacement rates may be, but they say that as offshoring grows, tech workers without jobs that don't require interpersonal skills, are being replaced more rapidly.

IT workers concerned about displacement "can focus on further developing these interpersonal skills, or may find more robust long-term careers in IT professions that involve significant face-to-face interaction such as those involving cross-organizational process change or hands-on support functions," the report's authors wrote.

Since IT workers have been more severely affected than other types of workers, Tambe and Hitt argue that policy-makers could focus on tech workers to provide help, including job training and government compensation to offset wage losses. Educational institutions will have to react as well, with "increased emphasis on the development of interpersonal and management skills within the IT curriculum."

Source:- computerworld.com/

Skelta Software Named as Finalist in 2008 American Business Awards

Skelta Software was named a Finalist today in the Best New Product or Service - Computer Software category in The 2008 American Business Awards।

More than 2,600 entries from companies of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted for consideration in more than 40 categories, including Best Overall Company, Best Executive, Best New Product or Service, Best Corporate Social Responsibility Program, and new categories including Best Management Team and Best Corporate Environmental Responsibility Program. Skelta DMS, a next-generation document management solution from Skelta Software will be competing in the Best New Product or Service category for Software.

Skelta DMS is designed to help organizations surmount key barriers in electronic records and data management. It integrates core business processes with paper and electronic documents. to manage any paper or electronic document through its life cycle. Further, Skelta DMS simulates physical activities in document management such as indexing and numbering, annotating, routing, signing, additional attachments, storage and retrieval to ensure that an organization is able to make a smooth transition to electronic records and document management.

Talking about the nomination, Arvind Agarwal, CTO, Skelta Software said “Skelta DMS was designed from a completely new perspective – rather than treat documents as a static piece of electronic data, Skelta DMS focuses on documents as dynamic participants in a business process. We are delighted that our innovative approach has been recognized”.

“ABA entries grew more than 30% this year, so being named a Finalist is more of an accomplishment than ever before,” said Michael Gallagher, founder and president of The Stevie Awards. “It means that independent business executives have agreed that the nominee is worthy of national recognition. We congratulate all of the Finalists on their achievement and wish them well in the competition.”

Sanjay Shah, CEO, Skelta Software said “Nomination to the Stevie’s Finalist list is a fantastic achievement. It is a matter of great pride that the distinguished award panel chose our product from among the hundreds of nominations received. It is a further testament to the importance that business and industry accords to effective process automation solutions.”

Details about The American Business Awards and the list of Finalists in all categories are available at www.stevieawards.com/aba.

About The Stevie Awards
Stevie Awards are conferred in four programs: The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, The Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Honoring companies of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about The Stevie Awards at www.stevieawards.com.

Global Sponsor of the 2008 Stevie Awards is Dow Jones. Supporting sponsors of The 2008 American Business Awards include FIS Softpro, High Performance Technologies Inc., John Hancock, RCN Corporation, Richardson, and Ultimate Software. Media sponsors include the Business TalkRadio Network, CRM Advocate, and Human Resource Executive.

About Skelta Software
Skelta is an innovative software product company specializing in enterprise-wide Business Process Management (BPM) and Advanced Workflow solutions for small to large-sized businesses worldwide. Its flagship product, Skelta BPM.NET 2007 is a BPM workflow software that is built on cutting-edge Microsoft .NET, XML, and Web services technologies. It is also the world's first embeddable workflow engine. Skelta enables business users and developers to design and deploy workflow applications using software tools with which they are already familiar. In addition, Skelta enables businesses to leverage on their existing investments in Microsoft technologies such as InfoPath, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint.

Skelta, a recent recipient of the 2008 CODiE Awards Finalist, has also won several other awards at industry forums such as Microsoft 2006 Regional Winning Customer Award, Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 Attendee Choice Award, Finalist in 2007 International Business Awards (Stevie Awards), Best of Tech Ed award in the Software Components category and NASSCOM IT Innovation 2005 Award। Skelta has also been named one of Asia’s top 100 companies by Red Herring magazine and acknowledged twice as one of the fastest growing technology companies in India and Asia Pacific region by winning Deloitte Technology Fast 50 India & Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific Awards for 2006 and 2007.

source=http://pr-canada.net/

An overview of continuous data protection

IT organizations have been caught between a rock and a hard place. Charged with protecting their company's information, IT organizations have established aggressive service level agreements (SLAs) that impact the manner in which they implement data protection by setting recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO).

Organizations struggle with shrinking or non-existent backup windows, the need to recover quickly, often to a specific point in time, and even meeting compliance or regulatory guidelines. Backing up to tape is no longer adequate; not only is it difficult to administer for backups and recoveries, but it lacks the speed, reliability, flexibility and simplicity IT needs to meet stringent SLAs. Backing up to disk using virtual tape emulation or virtual tape libraries also falls short as the administration of the solution is tape-centric and schedule driven. Add in the explosion of data, along with the challenge of protecting remote offices, and you have the challenge facing many of today's business--with IT sitting on the front lines of aligning business needs with today's technology.

As a result, a growing number of IT organizations are augmenting their traditional backup and recovery strategies with continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. CDP dramatically improves RPOs and RTOs while eliminating backup windows. What's more, CDP not only reduces the need for tape in the backup and recovery process but it also makes recovery easy enough that users can often recover their own files, without help from IT.

What is CDP?

CDP is a process that lets organizations continuously capture or track data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from specific points in the past. CDP systems may be block, file-, or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points in time.

CDP reduces the complexity of the data protection system and eliminates the classic challenge of theing backup window because it eliminates the need for full, incremental, or differential backups by protecting data immediately and then continuously backing it up to disk. CDP is not a complete replacement for traditional backup but rather an important component of a well-rounded backup and recovery strategy.

Can CDP be leveraged for backing up and recovering email? As the predominant form of communication for business transactions, email is an application that is mission-critical to organizations of all sizes. It generates a huge amount of information that must be immediately available and protected. The loss of a single message may generate hours of unnecessary and frustrating labor for administrators and/or users and can lower productivity or affect business operations. And with the introduction of Exchange 2007, organizations need protective solutions that can support the latest offering from Microsoft.

Not surprisingly, the amount of email data requiring protection and availability is growing exponentially. IT, in turn, is faced with the challenge of backing up this critical data within the existing backup window and recovering it quickly. Moreover, they must not only be able to back up and recover whole email databases but they also require a system which enables recovery of individual mailboxes or emails. However, if administrators want to back up email databases for complete disaster recovery purposes and be able to recover individual email, folders, or mailboxes, they typically have had to do separate backups.

New granular recovery technologies have emerged that enable mail messages, mailboxes, and folders to be restored individually without having to restore an entire email database, and without separate and redundant mailbox backups. In an Exchange environment, for example, only a single-pass full or incremental backup of Exchange is required, which dramatically decreases the time required to protect all mailboxes while also reducing the backup storage requirement.

CDP significantly streamlines backup and recovery of email by completely eliminating the need to perform scheduled daily email backups, and speeding recovery, thereby delivering email continuity for businesses.

How does CDP enable end users to recover their own data?

Because CDP is a disk-based protection and recovery solution, it is possible to enable end users to retrieve their own data. Some CDP solutions provide this type of functionality; some utilizing a simple Web interface that requires no training and enables end users to retrieve previous versions of files without contacting IT. Empowering end users to retrieve their own data frees up IT to focus on other business-critical needs of the organization.

With these self-service recovery solutions, retrieving lost, corrupted, or overwritten data is as easy as searching for and downloading a file from the Internet. There is no backup tape to locate or load and no additional information to restore to find the correct file. Best of all, these solutions do not require the installation of client software or agents on individual desktops laptops, and a familiar web paradigm requires no additional training. Users need only a standard Web browser, making data retrieval easier than ever.

Source: findarticles.com