A terse but excellent article on IEEE's USA Today's Engineer site today focuses on the often forgotten--or at least ignored--risk of offshoring. National security.

The full article is at: http://www.todaysengineer.org/2009/Nov/backscatter.asp. The most salient quote is:

"One area the [National Academy of Engineering] study gave relatively less attention to, listing it last in a series of ten findings, was offshoring’s impact on national security. In that regard, its main concern seemed to center on the possibility of detailed plans and other information about U.S. buildings and infrastructure falling into “the wrong hands,” and that maliciously placed code might compromise the security of DOD networks. Yet back in 1988, the Defense Science Board called the dependence of the U.S. military on foreign parts dangerously high."

I have argued in several previous blogs that it is not just national security--but any product security--that may suffer with offshoring. Offshoring is a bandage, not a cure. Always temporary in nature, it is founded on the assumption that labor will be cheaper elsewhere. Cheaper than the differential cost of transportation, shipping, inefficiencies of distributed teams, etc. Guess what?  As many are seeing now, the cycle lasts less than ten years, and the first (and second) wave of offshorers are now offshoring themselves. Does this increase product security? Statistics argue otherwise (ref. WEF estimate of counterfeiting as 8% of world trade).

Offshoring makes a lot of sense when those remote, skilled professionals are invested in your company and strategy. Otherwise, it's a short-term fix to a problem that goes unaddressed.

Cheers,

Steve