Mr. William J. Amelio, the president and CEO of Lenovo wrote a very thought provoking article in CIO Today (the page with the article seems to display strangely some of the time.  Once you get past the first display advertisement, you may encounter an advertisement appearing to fill the whole page.  You might need to scroll down to get to the article).

I completely agree with Mr. Amelio’s basic premise.  Global businesses do indeed need to think about leveraging, and serving, the entire world.  Specifically, he points out that:

“Over the next several years, virtually any global company’s success will depend on its willingness to reorient its view of the world map. This attitudinal — and longitudinal — shift will have enormous ramifications for business leaders, employees, and customers alike.”

He cautions that:

“Those who refuse to believe that the developing world is redefining the marketplace are shortsighted, bordering on arrogant.”

He could have added “non-competitive.”  The article continues with counsel for specific constituencies:

“Business leaders should start looking in emerging markets for answers if they hope to find the “secret sauce” needed to harness the economic explosion in this new world order. They need to spin the map around and look at it from a Pacific-centric view. This is where worldsourcing plays a role. A distributed global management approach is required to make a company nimble enough to reconfigure its resources and talent in real time so it can respond to rapid shifts in local market demand. You can’t get a feel for such shifts from an isolated corporate HQ. To truly grasp the nuance of local market dynamics, you need operational staff who know the cultures and norms. In addition to ensuring that your supply chain remains efficient, this will help you gauge and respond to cultural shifts that portend market demand changes.”

Mr. Amelio also has advice for the folks “in the trenches:”

“It [global sourcing] turns strategies such as outsourcing and offshoring on their heads; it’s about embracing and enfranchising local talent in markets everywhere to capitalize on the best ideas from all pockets of a company. No doubt, globalization has consequences in terms of job movement, but that’s inevitable in a highly competitive world economy. If you’re working for a multinational company, you’re competing against skill sets in countries around the world, but your job aptitude and career choices will no longer be limited by your geographic location. Employees who embrace this movement and look for ways to collaborate and contribute their best thinking, thereby driving and fostering innovation and better ways of doing business, will put themselves in career-growth situations — the antithesis of career stagnation.”

This article gets it pretty close to exactly right.  Organizations need to make global decisions.  They must carefully assess the resources available in each region as well as the local markets.  Software outsourcing decisions can’t be bases simply on cost anymore (actually, this was never a great idea).  Instead, you need to consider each region’s technical skills, capabilities for innovation and access to the local markets.

Technorati Tags:  Worldsourcing, Globalization, China, China Outsourcing