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.
The offshoring of high-tech work threatens to weaken U.S. leadership in technology and innovation and has serious implications for national security and the privacy of sensitive information. It puts a downward pressure on wages that will likely discourage many of America's best and brightest young people from pursuing careers in science and engineering. Offshoring has contributed to approximately 1.4 percent unemployed in management, professional and related occupations, service occupations, and sales and office occupations. This percentage will [increase incrementally] in years to come. The proposal should reasonably address some concerns facing the nation.
You've been in touch with some members of Congress. How can they help this plan materialize? Since this issue is national in scope, I have requested guidance from congressional officials, in particular senators for economic development. Federal grants will be needed to help implement the model, as well as provisions in legislation that would lower operational costs for the companies that administer the program. Jointly, these two factors will enable the strategy to evolve and grow.
Who would administer such programs? Universities, or the companies that hire the students? U.S. companies and universities would form joint ventures, and a third party would serve as liaison, employing the students and providing management process and controls. This liaison between the universities and their client companies will be a for-profit U.S. corporation eligible for grants from the government and advised by representatives from government, the companies and the schools.
The way I see it is that this is an onshore alternative that, if done correctly, can support business processes and produce software higher in quality for the same price as offshoring.
For more on Chebbi's onshore BPO proposal, download the PDF at http://deepakchebbi.com/a-bpo.pdf.
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A course in innovation
Plummeting enrollment in computer science programs has led to a call for a new curriculum by the Education Board of the Association for Computing Machinery. This curriculum would give innovation a more prominent role as a way to improve both the image and appeal of computer science.
Writing in the November issue of Communications of the ACM, Education Board co-chairman Andrew McGettrick and past ACM president Peter J. Denning say that the public associates computer science with programmers, and in recent years, the definition of programmer has narrowed to mean "coder" and not someone concerned with the broader issues of the design, development, testing, debugging, documentation and maintenance of software.
McGettrick and Denning argue that innovation is something that can be taught. They stress that it isn't just the invention of novel technologies but can also take the form of new processes, new functionality and new business models. They propose embedding "the foundational practices of innovation into the curriculum, so that students learn innovation by doing, without necessarily being aware they are engaged with systematic processes." The curriculum begins with the study of great innovations. There is also a notable lack of math in their proposed first- and second-year course work. a New computer science Curriculum
Innovation themes proposed for freshman and sophomore computer science courses by Andrew McGettrick and Peter J. Denning:
First-year courses and modules
-- Programming and multimedia
-- Great innovators in computing
-- Computers in support of space travel
-- Building your own computer
-- Securing your computer
-- Robots
Second-year courses and modules
-- Building search engines, other software tools
-- Great innovators in computing
-- Forensics
-- Puzzles and logic
-- The Web and digital libraries
-- Computer graphics and animation