Offshoring ethics (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Premise 1:Businesses aren’t moral agents.

This isn’t up for debate. The Business Roundtable, the official voice of American industry, made this clear in 1997: Businesses exist solely to maximize shareholder value. Fiduciary responsibilities? Yes. Legal obligations? Sure. But moral? Since most business success comes at the expense of competitors, they can’t be.

Premise 2: Businesses have no patriotic duty. Don’t be aghast. It’s all about shareholder value, remember? If moving manufacturing to Kuala Lumpur helps, fine and dandy. If opening a post office box in Bermuda to avoid paying taxes increases profits, wonderful. A business isn’t beholden to any particular nation. (Best exposition on this subject: Arthur Jensen’s speech to Howard Beale in Network. Rent it and you’ll find that Paddy Chayefski brilliant satire has been transformed into the business community’s manifesto.)

Premise 3: Patriotism and morality have no connection. Unless you think Americans are intrinsically more deserving than other people, or that any action, if performed by the United States of America, is automatically good, it’s inescapable that patriotism has all the moral content of being a Chicago Cubs fan. At best, patriotism is about self-interest — not a bad thing, but not a moral issue.

We’re ready: Is moving work offshore immoral? No.

You’re acting as the agent of your employer, an amoral (not immoral) entity. You’re increasing shareholder value, a goal with no intrinsic moral content. And for every human being you lay off, another gets a job. Offshoring is morally neutral.

You are, perhaps, being unpatriotic: Creating unemployment here by transferring jobs elsewhere isn’t to this country’s benefit. Even that formula is simplistic, though: If competitors reduce their costs by going offshore and you don’t, all you’re doing is contributing to your company’s failure — in the long run you save no jobs at all. What choice do you really have?

Your choice starts with your methodologies. Some lend themselves to offshoring. Others, such as “adaptive methodologies,” are better suited to up-close-and-personal on-shore staffing … and hold the promise of increasing the productivity of your developers and integrators enough to compensate for offshore rates.

Adaptive methodologies don’t fit all situations. Neither, for that matter, do the methodologies required for successful offshoring, nor anything else for that matter. Adaptive methodologies, offshoring, the Rational Unified Process, structured analysis, and all the other techniques available to you are just tools in your toolkit. Your responsibility isn’t to offshore, onshore, or anything else.

It’s to use the best tool for each job.