The role of ICT in the growth of international outsourcing.
Outsourcing is the concept of taking internal company functions and paying an outside firm to handle. International outsourcing/ offshoring, has become one of the important income source of some developing countries, such as India, China, Malaysia, etc. Those country has 1 thing in common which is high financial attractiveness/cheaper labour, and high skilled and availability of workers and good business environment of the country. India is one of the most popular country for outsourcing, especially to English speaking firm. India, a former British colony, people lives in India are required to learn English, which advantage them as one of the biggest outsourcing country. Not only the linguistic infrastructure of india led to the outsourcing of the country, but also ICT take an important role here as an one of biggest reason of growth of India in terms of outsourcing.
India is famous for the English call centres, but nowadays ICT allows India to have variety company as the outsourcing destination. For example, finance and accounting, business analysis, radiologists, etc. These white-collar jobs requiring human resources (intelligence) are dependent on ICT for them to outsource into India. Since India is a highly populated country, with high standards of education, this attracts foreign company to outsource their internal function to India.
One of the reason white-collar jobs successfully outsource to India is time, for example radiologist in India. When during the night time in US, emergency patients went through x-rays without an radiologist, it would not be possible to examine what's wrong with your body. Even, there's a radiologist available, it would not be his/her working hours, also examine a x-ray may cost a week or more. However, by outsourcing the job, it would reduce time it takes as well as the cost, even there's emergency in night time, like the company in Bangalore, India would be the day time. Thus, there would be many radiologist, with the application of ICT, it would be possible to finish the report within few hours, with verification from other radiologist.
Even the call centres requires ICT to work, when you call to the customer service of a company, and that company outsource their customer service to call centres in India, and when you need help to solve your problem, it requires ICT to do so. ICT will allow help from far distance, without ICT, call centres in India would be less today. From varieties of advantages that India has, most of cities in outsourcing ranking are from India. From the rankings below, it shows the highly dependence on India to lowering the cost of the firm.
Without ICT, firms in developed countries would not be able to outsource their internal functions, even they can, it would not be easily done as it is now. Outsourcing has become the most important income in India, and ICT helped the Indian economy to rise from periphery slowly to semi-periphery country in terms of economy.