Tuesday, March 2, 2010

IBM to cut Australian workforce?

According to CRN, IBM is considering cutting 800 jobs in Australia and (co-incidently I'm sure) looking to hire c.1,200 in China and India. That may work with back-office tasks like payroll and paper-shuffling but IMHO it's a bad move when...

"... workers have been told that IBM may service all its customers besides the Federal Government from "low cost centres" in India and China."

There's nothing in the article to indicate whether the Lotus group will be trimmed. I can't say if there's any fat left in the Lotus team but I do know that some of those busy little beavers have been working fairly long hours for quite a long time. It's not unusual to get an email from one of them stamped 10:00pm or later.

When you make your product delivery into a commodity then you run the risk that your customers will see all of your products as a commodity and decide to buy on price alone. I guess the upside is that IBM will be forced to rely more on its Business Partners as its feet on the ground.
.

1 comment:

Gavin Bollard said...

I'm so sick of offshoring. What the larger corporations are doing to people in second and third world countries is nothing short of ... (well, I can't put a word that will make it past the filters), but you know what I mean.

If it was "helping" people in those countries, I'd agree but it's not - it's simply taking advantage.