You are a staff writer at IT News and Views a popular online

You are a staff writer at IT News and Views, a popular online newsletter aimed at IT professionals. Your editor has asked you to prepare a special report for next week’s edition. Specifically, she wants you to research the subject of software outsourcing, and other significant trends that might affect software development in the future. She wants you to cite specific sources for your information, including current IT employment statistics and employment forecasts from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Tasks

1.Search for information about software outsourcing generally, using the search techniques described in Part D of the Systems Analyst’s Toolkit.

2.Visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics site at www.bls.gov and search for information about employment trends affecting systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers.

3.Does the Bureau of Labor Statistics offer any comments or insights into the subject of outsourcing generally? What conclusions does it reach?

4.In your report, comment on whether the offshore outsourcing of IT jobs is just another step in the progression that began with manufacturing jobs, or represents a whole new trend. Be sure to cite Web research sources and your own reasons.

Solution

1.

Software outsourcing is a practice where an individual or a company designs, develops, implements and maintains software or IT systems for another company. Software outsourcing is a practice of building software using the services of another company instead of doing that in-house.

Software outsourcing is mainly done to reduce expenditure of developing something in-house. Outsourcing to an off-shore location where cheap and abundant manpower is available helps in saving cost in building the same thing in-house. However, software outsourcing sometimes lack coordination and control. There are more risk of failure involved than developing software in-house.

2.

The BLS website states that employment of computer system analysts would rise by 21 % from 2014 to 2024.

Employment trend of software developers would rise by 17% from 2014 to 2024. This is much faster than the average growth trend of employment.

Employment in internet broadcasting and publishing has grown largely in the past few years and that in newspapers, periodicals and books have declined.

3.

The BLS provides some insight into the subject of outsourcing. It says that the output per hour of labour has grown at a much faster rate since outsourcing was started.

4.

Offshore outsourcing of IT jobs present a whole new trend which is different from what was started with manufacturing jobs. The scope of outsourcing and the impact in case of manufacturing was limited. However, outsourcing of IT jobs have happened at a massive scale and has changed the economy of many developing nations. It has directly affected employment trends, business growth and the development of economy in many countries.