UK IT managers must develop a set of standards that
foreign IT workers must adhere to when taking on offshored work if
they are to enforce acceptable conduct, according to analyst
Gartner.
Partha Iyengar, analyst at Gartner, said IT managers needed to
bridge cultural gaps in what was acceptable conduct for foreign IT
workers, such as not casually disclosing private data..
Iyengar cited a problem where one US company offshored its
payroll system to India, where it is a cultural practice for
workers to openly compare paychecks.
However, when one Indian IT worker disclosed the pay details of
an American executive back to an American colleague, the IT manager
came under fire for not setting employer/employee expectations.
"IT managers offshoring project work need to spend a month in
their offshore location to understand working practices and to
improve their cultural awareness of how foreign teams work," said
Iyengar.
"Differences in what is acceptable conduct can lead to data
being informally leaked and can put an offshore project at
risk."
Iyengar said that business that offshored needed to draft a
governance framework - a guideline of employee conduct - for
foreign IT workers to abide by, but this could only be correctly
done by being aware of how foreign teams worked from the start.
Gartner predicts that a "borderless state" will prevail within
the information and communications technology industry by 2015, and
that business will increasingly source their services from around
the globe without regard to the country of origin or headquarters
of the supplier.