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| | Former corporate exec promotes rural outsourcing
Wednesday, Aug 25, 2004 By Wesley Brown Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - A former chief information officer at a Fortune 500 company told Rotary Club members here Tuesday that not only are U.S. manufacturing jobs moving overseas, but so is technology-related work. Kathy Brittain White, former CIO of Cardinal Health Inc., said that if something is not done soon to stop the flow of IT jobs overseas, the results will be devastating. "If something is not done in 10 years, every technology job (in the U.S.) will be overseas," said White, who was named to Forbes magazine's Top 25 America's Businesswomen in 2001. "That is a scary concept." According to the International Data Corp., the global market for outsourcing will grow at an annual rate of 7 percent to hit $1.2 trillion by 2007. Relocating work from Europe and the United States to countries such as India and Pakistan is cutting costs for global firms by up to 40 percent, the study showed. Another study by Deloitte Research in 2003 indicated that the world's 100 largest financial services companies expect to transfer an estimated $356 billion of their operations and two million jobs offshore over the next five years in efforts to significantly reduce costs. The survey found that each of the 100 financial institutions expects to reduce costs by an average $1.4 billion by 2008 by sending work to low-cost centers like India from the developed economies in North America, Europe and Asia. White, an alumni of Arkansas State University, recently created a new company in Jonesboro called Rural Sourcing Inc., which is working to attract companies seeking IT consulting work to rural communities. A nonprofit arm of the company is working with ASU and Southern Arkansas University at Magnolia to train students at those colleges for technology-related careers. The for-profit part of the corporation is now actively seeking to bring some of those jobs back to rural communities in the U.S., White said. She added that the company has already started negotiations with companies in Chicago and Hawaii. Currently, it has 12 employees at its corporate office in Jonesboro. "We can't continue to have the brain drain," White said. "We educate our people. They have nowhere to work and they leave the state. "That is how we are going to win, by bringing IT jobs en masse to Arkansas," said White, who donated a $2 million gift to ASU's College of Business to establish the Horizon Institute of Technology two years ago. |
