|
|
|
OutSourcing to the Heartland
November 22, 2005
When Robin Viera graduated from East Carolina University in Greenville, North
Carolina, in May, she assumed she would have to relocate to a larger city to use her
degree in business and systems analysis. But she was reluctant to uproot her husband and 11-year-old stepson, and leave behind their extended families.
Instead, she landed a program-analyst position with Rural Sourcing, an IT company that
outsources not to India or Mexico, but rural America.
"I don't know what I would have done if (Rural Sourcing) hadn't come here," said Viera,
24. "There are not a lot of jobs around here."
Rural Sourcing claims to provide information technology services at 30 percent to 50
percent below most U.S. consulting firms by tapping into the increasing number of IT
professionals in rural America, where overhead and wages are lower than in metropolitan
areas.
Viera's employer is one of a growing number of companies looking to non-urban U.S.
locations as part of the outsourcing equation. The Durham, North Carolina-based
company's founder and president, former health executive Kathy Brittain White, realized
that professionals like Viera prefer to stay close to home after college graduation, but
often face a void of jobs when they do.
"I believed there is untapped talent in these locations that has been overlooked," said
White, who grew up in Oxford, Arkansas, which had a population of 200 at the time.
Many rural American communities have suffered proverbial brain drains, White said.
Subsequently, their populations are aging and tax bases are shrinking. When she started
Rural Sourcing, her goal was to help reverse these trends.
White, who was named to the Forbes list of top American businesswomen in 2001, soon
realized that her business model was not just altruistic, but it was also potentially
profitable.
Today Rural Sourcing claims 20 clients, including Mattel and Cardinal Health, $1 million
in revenue and 50 full-time employees at five IT centers in Arkansas, North Carolina and
Missouri.
White started the company two years ago with $2 million of her own money in
partnership with her alma mater, Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, where she
earned a bachelor's degree and MBA while raising two small children. She hopes to
employ 100 full-time consultants by the end of next year, and 1,000 within five to seven
years.
The company charges $35 to $50 per hour for IT expertise, which may cost around $100
in New York City. While this is no match for outsourcing rates in India, clients benefit
from local accents and similar time zones -- not to mention the absence of stigma
sometimes attached to farming jobs out to foreign countries.
Peak Learning, an e-learning company based in San Luis Obispo, California, recently
hired Rural Sourcing after considering IT service providers in Central California, which
proved too expensive, and overseas companies, which were too inconvenient -- and didn't jibe with the executives' principles.
"The biggest benefit is knowing that we're giving jobs to American workers, versus a
foreign country," said operations manager Tina Schultz.
Schultz added that her company likes that Rural Sourcing hires recent college grads, in
keeping with Peak Learning's practice of relying on young minds to drive its technology.
Companies like Rural Sourcing are unlikely to replace overseas outsourcing but can
provide low-cost, high-quality service, said Michael F. Corbett, head of an outsourcing
research firm and author of The Outsourcing Revolution.
"The global approach is about getting the right resources in the right place," Corbett said,
adding that sometimes a culture-specific perspective is irreplaceable.
"It's one thing to design the operations of a website," he said, "and it's another thing when
you're selecting images and the exact choice of language that is on the money in terms of
what makes sense to the intended audience."
White is far from the first person to identify the benefits of in-country sourcing.
DaimlerChrysler is among the clients of marketing and web-design company Lakota
Express, which is based on a South Dakota American Indian reservation.
San Diego-based SeaCode is seeking to anchor a cruise ship a few miles off the
California coast on which IT professionals from around the world would write code.
In January, Greenwood Village, Colorado-based Ciber started offering low-cost IT
services from cities like Tampa and Oklahoma City, while computer giant Dell has
opened operations in smaller communities including Twin Falls, Idaho.
Such communities are often eager for employers. According to the Center for the Study
of Rural America, rural U.S. counties experienced 5.6 percent unemployment in August -
- 16.7 percent higher than in metro areas. Forrester Research projects that U.S. companies will move about 3.4 million white-collar service jobs offshore by 2015.
|
|
Download PDF