Gartner Report on Offshoring IT Jobs 4-2005

A recent report by Gartner suggests that outsourcing and offshoring are going to ramp up significantly in the next few years -- but that automation will have an even greater impact on IT.

An article about the report in Information Week says

• More IT jobs in the West are at risk of disappearing because of automation and
  productivity gains than from offshore outsourcing. The effect of those factors on IT job displacement will, by 2015, be six times greater than the impact of offshoring,
• 30% of IT jobs in developed countries will be "offshored" by 2015 (according to Gartner).
• Last year, Forrester Research analyst John McCarthy said 3.4 million U.S. services jobs--including a number of IT-related positions--would move offshore by 2015. According to the Information Technology Association of America, there are about 10.4 million IT professionals employed in the United States.
• over the next five years, Gartner says in the report, worldwide spending on offshore research and development and engineering will increase by a whopping 860%, from $1.25 billion in 2004 to as much as $12 billion in 2010, Gartner predicts.
• Offshore spending on infrastructure outsourcing will grow from between $100 million and $250 million to between $3 billion and $4 billion over the same period. Offshore spending on application-development services will more than double from $23 billion to as much as $50 billion.

The "Observant vs. Secular" Divide

Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect made an interesting point on the PBS Newshour 4-8-05. Here are some edited comments:

HAROLD MEYERSON: We've in essence replaced the old rift between Protestants and Catholics, which was a huge source of political tension in this country in the
last part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century. That's been replaced now by a tension between the more religiously observant and the more non-religiously secular. And the pope had become kind of a unifying figure for the more religiously observant. (No matter what your own personal religious belief.) There's a kind of new dividing line, which isn't Protestant/Catholic but more observant secular and this Republican coalition that George W. Bush heads is very invested in the growth, the care, and the feeding of this observant coalition. It's a very important part of the Republican coalition.

Launching a blog experiment

I'm beginning this experiment with blogging.

I wonder what will be the most interesting things that I will learn.