Who he is: Technology consultant

E-mail: deepak@flash.net

Business process outsourcing by U.S. companies to foreign lands worries a lot of people, but Deepak Chebbi has a plan. His vision of a new onshore model of BPO is devised in a way that he says will accomplish several goals: save U.S. jobs that might otherwise go offshore, make the nation more secure, create work for laid-off IT workers, and give college students hands-on IT experience and reason to believe that there is a future in IT. Chebbi recently spoke with contributing editor Jamie Eckle.

In a nutshell, what is your proposal, and what do you hope to accomplish with it? To use full-time undergraduate and graduate students to support business services that currently are being offshored. Laid-off workers, augmented by "active" corporate workers, would serve as mentors, project managers or project leads to ensure that work done by students is of equal or better quality than what is done by offshore vendors.