New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

I saw this tongue-in-cheek quote that came from a venture capitalist's blog recently:

"About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,000 for. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I only have to work 90 minutes a day, talking code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing."

While there has been a lot of fear in the technology sector about jobs being outsourced to overseas, the fear is no different than what many other sectors have experienced such as textiles decades ago, basic goods manufacturing, etc.  But this humorous quote also points out some key opportunities in the IT sector.

The key for IT workers is to constantly migrate to the higher-valued roles and away from the lower-valued roles.

In my opinion as a software company CEO for 10+ years is that software coding is indeed a low skilled job compared to other much more valuable roles that would be very difficult to "offshore."

In my experienced, the value of roles in software development go something like this from most important to least important:

1. Business Process Redesign - the ability to take a business process, map it, measure it, analyze it, etc. and develop a new, break-through process that completely changes the rules with fewer steps, faster throughput, etc.  This is a very valuable role that would be extremely difficult to offshore because of the highly personal nature of the interaction that needs to happen in order to tease out the existing business process and the potential for a new process.  Many offshore IT projects have failed miserably due to a lack of proper business process design that requires a great deal of subject matter expertise.
2. Software Architectural Design - the ability to create an elegant, coherent and comprehensive architectural framework for software that allows the application to function with a high degree of performance, while being highly scalable in terms of the ability to add both functionality and the number of users as seamlessly as possible.  Much like a skilled architect of high-end custom homes, good software architects are highly skilled, in high demand and have deep subject matter expertise in specific industry verticals.  This is very difficult to find in an offshore environment.
3. Project Management - the ability to keep a team on task, on time and on budget, while skillfully managing scope creep and management's expectations is a skill that is in very short supply.  Many offshore projects that gone to two project managers, the U.S.-based manager and the offshore manager that in continuous communication.  A really good project manager can manage multiple projects at the same time and deliver a very high value in the process.  Similar to the home builder or construction manager, these guys need to go from job to job and keep the workers working according to the architect's specifications.
4. Software Code Development and Software Testing - both of these skills continue to be "de-skilled" through better and better software toolkits and of course can be easily offshored as long as the first three jobs are done well.  To go back to the construction metaphor, think of these as the sub-contractors: the carpenters and plumbers that are simply building out the building according to the architect's specifications and the project manager's constant guidance.

If you are an IT worker looking to create a business in the IT sector, look no further than the three top jobs listed above and align yourself with excellent offshore resources that you can employ better than they can on their own.  And, your best bet is to go very, very deep in a certain area of expertise.

To illustrate this point, I was interviewing a prospective employee last year and what came out on his resume was 15 years of deep expertise in developing cell phone billing software for various telcos.  It was a huge misalignment for him to interviewing with me for a high-level project manager job in property management software.  My recommendation to him was to take all of his years of expertise in telcos and software development and create his own company as a business process redesign expert, architect and project manager of telco billing systems.  I further suggested that he develop proprietary software code that could become an add-on to SAP, Oracle and other popular accounting packages to create as much intellectual propery as possible as well as a large sales channel to take it to market.  He had a lot of expertise and experience that he could tap to solve a common customer problem.