American global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney’s recent report on “The Widening Impact of Automation” clears fog around the actual picture of IT Industry’s recent development i.e. Robotic Process Automation. According to the report due to Automation more than 1 million jobs are at risk in four countries alone US, Poland, India and Philippines. Automation has been here since quite a long time before disruption found its place in global business processes. It is an inevitable fact that technology is an evolutionary phenomenon and it will continuously improve in future. Automation has helped humans in every way to improve their quality of life by increasing productivity and efficiency in workplace.
We are in 21st century which we might better call “The Age of Automation” where most of the repetitive tasks in industries like Mechanical, IT, manufacturing etc which were done by humans have now been replaced by Robots. Automation already has started to play its role in digital disruption by changing the way businesses were performed. We have been hearing lot on job cuts in BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) in countries such as US, Poland, India and Philippines. The IT job market is always evolving and it is scraping the older technologies and creating avenues for new ones.
This has been a continuous trend in technology and main factor behind it is “Automation”. As technology becomes smart Automation gets smarter. If we talk of Outsourcing in relation to Automation we all know that developing countries have gained economically from outsourcing of various IT and BPO jobs by the developed countries. But sadly this trend might undergo major change. In the Global Service Index report of 2016 A.T. Kearney had spoke of the gradual shift of business model in conducting business services from offshore to onshore front as one of the most acceptable models of outsourcing. This change is because, most of the repetitive tasks which were operated at offshore locations are now being performed by cloud based anonymous data centers near the actual workplace.
Automation is nothing new to most of developed nations and one should readily agree to this fact that a lot of tasks which were performed by humans in the past have now been replaced by machines and technology. This legacy will continue in the future as well. Now do we ever regret these developments and has it in anyway stopped businesses from flourishing? The answer will be a big “No”. Everything has its pros and cons and Automation is and will create avenues for growth of humans as well.
pliXos totally agrees with A.T Kearney that while considering the loss of jobs due to Automation we normally forget that it is also making the remaining jobs more productive and eventually creating new, better and high paid jobs. In BPO sector the low cost offshore countries like India will witness more number of job loss due to the abundance of repetitive outsourced jobs like accounting and finance or customer service. For a country to be strong and hold the outsourced job there should be equal mix of business functions that is outsourced which is difficult for any country in today’s world. You may also read the article “Automation in Software Development - pliXos View”
IT Outsourcing is dominated by the fact that companies used to outsource various IT functions from BPO, Software development, Mobile Apps development etc. to leverage the cost advantage of developing countries. The availability of skilled IT professionals, lower hourly wage rate, good communication and the proficiency of the service providers in handling complex issues in the outsourced projects are some of the pillars on which outsourcing is still standing strong. We do not agree with anyone saying that IT Outsourcing will no longer exist in the coming future. Job cuts and shift of IT Business models is not a new thing but if we look a little at the history of IT Services and its span, we will observe that technology always brings upon a successor from time to time and along with it brings a change for all.
With one operation becoming obsolete there open several opportunities for new domains as well. It is of course a difficult time for low skilled IT professionals as they are now being replaced by cognitive automation. Moreover pliXos agrees with A.T. Kearney that the demand for matching the right person for high skilled profiles at anyplace and anytime will increase in future. Based on this, pliXos always strives to meet our customer’s requirements successfully by providing exact match of skills and experience required to handle an outsourced software development project. Not only this, pliXos also provide a cloud based platform integrated with innovative tools to provide automation at maximum stages of software development.
Fig 2: pliXos SaaS tools as a means to provide automation in outsourcing application development
As technology is about to bring a new industrial revolution and global IT spending expected to increase in future there will be high demand for high skilled IT professionals across the globe and outsourcing will be the best possible solution for these jobs. The combined effect of political scenarios, educated population and Automation will favor outsourcing of high skilled tasks such as Software Development, Application Development and maintenance, Big Data centres, IoT, artificial intelligence etc depending on the suitability of a location.
Report from A.T. Kearney’s Impact of Automation speaks that though Automation is being adopted at different levels of Business services, yet it requires human intervention at each level in different way. Many service providers claim to provide automation services and depending on their capabilities they come under eligibility criterias of customers for outsourcing specific projects. pliXos here answers the questions for the customers and IT Industry that, how will a customer become sure of whether he needs to outsource an IT project or not and if he needs to than which part of the project they should consider for outsourcing.
If they come down to conclude that they need to outsource any IT project than the second query comes into play which is most important i.e. finding a fitting service provider they should hire or offshore to a remote location as the company finds it suitable. Third thing is will that service provider prove to be a right decision for the organization or they will become a nuisance. How will they manage their remote service providers for proper governance of the entire projects? , how will they manage documentation of the proposal and contract? , all these and many more uncertainties can be resolved in few easy steps, if customers switch to SaaS tools provided by popular pliXos B2B Marketplace.
Hence pliXos (German based IT Consultant and Prime contractor for IT Projects) provides tools that enable Automation in specific areas in software development, mobile application development and other IT related functions. pliXos also provides customers the opportunities to check reliability of SW service providers for a specific IT project or furthermore takes full responsibilities of the entire projects independent on the complexities involved.
Not only this, pliXos has list of service providers with a proven record of providing excellent services to its clients. Thus, pliXos provides Automation, and innovative tools to clients for successful outsourcing of their projects at offshore/nearshore and onshore locations. If you have a project deadline and want to give it the best shape than pliXos B2B marketplace is just the right place you can look up to. pliXos holds a successful record of providing the best suitable IT Outsourcing services to its customers in the most innovative way and help them save extra costs through its SaaS tools.
To sum up above Automation is the concept that is reshaping Outsourcing. There will be lots of change but also new opportunities.
Sources
1. A.T. Kearney: The Widening impact of Automation
2. pliXos- Global Sourcing Blog
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