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At Home: Company that opens rural tech offices coming to Greenville
Sunday, March 6, 2005
GREENVILLE - Fed up with the flight of technology jobs to India and beyond, Kathy
White is trying to get companies to see the advantages of sending those jobs to the wideopen, rural places right here at home.
Her Rural Sourcing Inc. already has offices set up in places such as Jonesboro, Ark., and
Portales, N.M., off-the-beaten-track college towns where there's a steady supply of
trained workers who can perform basic programming and information technology tasks at
30 percent to 50 percent less than the labor costs of most domestic firms.
Its next office is slated to open this spring in Greenville, the home of East Carolina
University, where officials believe that technology outsourcing could help replace the
thousands of traditional jobs that have dried up in tobacco and textiles. In fact, Rural
Sourcing's office will be housed in a shuttered textile plant.
"If you can be in India, you can certainly be in Greenville, N.C.," said John Chaffee, the
director of Pitt County's development commission.
White came up with the idea for Rural Sourcing after searching for informationtechnology
workers in her former job as chief information officer for an Ohio
pharmaceutical company, Cardinal Health Inc. She said that it occurred to her to try to
reverse the offshore trend and move the work to people outside traditional metropolitan
areas in the United States.
So far, the 2-year-old company has 35 workers, 20 of whom are in Jonesboro. White
plans to hire about 12 workers in the Greenville center, but projects employment here
eventually to reach 100.
White declined to discuss her company's revenue, but said that it is breaking even.
"We feel like that is a positive thing for a startup company," she said, adding that within
five years she plans to have 50 centers - all in rural communities.
Greenville, a city of 65,000 about 80 miles east of Raleigh, fits the bill with a quiet
lifestyle and, most important, a low cost of living.
Chaffee would like to see Rural Sourcing be a catalyst for Greenville to become a hub for
IT sourcing centers in smaller towns. He predicted that the quality of life and access to
high-speed Internet service will prove attractive to companies, citing a medical-software
company that moved from New York to Edenton, a picturesque former colonial capital
on Albemarle Sound.
Still, IT jobs haven't been easy to come by.
"Students who graduate from East Carolina and who would like to stay in the area and
work in information technology don't have a lot of options," said Rick Niswander, the
dean of East Carolina's business college.
Niswander believes that Greenville and similar towns across the country can make a
strong case for IT "rural sourcing," given their lower costs of living and of doing business
and the increased concern among corporations about information security.
"From a business point of view, it will help them moderate their costs and still have good
quality control and have a greater assurance about security," Niswander said.
For development officials trying to stem the flow of jobs offshore, the stakes are
enormous.
Forrester Research has predicted that at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136
billion in wages will leave the United States by 2015.
Thanks to the Internet, such jobs as software development and systems maintenance can
often be handled in countries where workers are well-trained and speak English, but
command about one-sixth the wages of an American worker.
Niswander believes that although rural sourcing may be more expensive than offshoring,
it also offers political advantages to companies based in America.
"When you talk to business people about it, it resonates well," he said. "Not always is
absolutely the lowest price the best thing."
He said that an IT graduate who would expect a $50,000 starting salary in Raleigh or
Charlotte or $60,000 in New York, might be content with pay in the $30,000 to $40,000
range in Greenville.
One Rural Sourcing programmer said that without Rural Sourcing, she wouldn't have
been able to work close to home in her field after graduating last year from Arkansas
State University in Jonesboro.
Molly Marshall, 23, lives an hour from her hometown but works in IT for a Fortune 500
client that she declined to identify.
"Compared to a lot of other places, the pay is good, and we have benefits," Marshall said
in a telephone interview. "I didn't really want to leave my family. I get to travel every few
months, but I still get to live here." |
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