Apple, during the holiday season, ran a heartwarming ad about a hard-of-hearing father who had given his daughter a guitar. The daughter played and sang a pretty tune. Her mother signaled her father to turn up the volume on his Airpods so he could enjoy his daughter’s song.

His Airpods performed even better than he might have imagined, because if you listened to the ad closely you noticed that his daughter was harmonizing with herself.

No, this has little or nothing to do with this week’s essay, which is about your sourcing strategy and how to organize it. I just figured AI’s new Apple-driven ability for singers to harmonize with themselves in real time was worthy of note.

On to more consequential subjects.

We’ve been talking about H-1B visas and related matters, and it occurred to me that so often, CIOs are advised to create strategies about subsets rather than whole sets. The advice to craft an H-1B strategy is just the latest example. It’s bad advice because any decision to engage H-1B workers is also a decision to not use: internal staff; consultants; contractors engaged either singly or through a staff-augmentation provider; on-shore integrators; or multi-shore integrators.

And, for each of these categories you as CIO get to choose from among in-person, hybrid, or fully virtual staff.

Which is to say you need, not an H-1B strategy, but a Sourcing Strategy.

To make this decision, you should first decide which characteristics are most important for the workforce roles you have to populate – characteristics such as compatibility with your business culture; familiarity with your organization’s methodologies; loyalty; ability to provide leadership; and anticipated time-zone-driven frictions in team functioning.

And not, by the way, how many labor dollars per hour you can save. As Fred Brooks documented in his classic The Mythical Man Month, the best employees are easily 10 times more effective than average ones. Do the math – it isn’t hard to compute the benefit of paying even double for the best.

Then there’s your ability to locate, recruit, orient, hire, and on-board staff with the scale and time-frames you need.

Next: you’re going to be engaging a different sort of staff, and in significant quantities, which means you should think through how management practices will need to change as well; not to mention how IT is organized.

Think you’re done thinking? Think again. If your sourcing depends on staff relationships other than employees … especially if you’re planning to outsource to teams that will be responsible for broad swaths of IT functions … you need to organize responsibilities so the companies involved don’t have perverse incentives that lead them to act in ways that benefit them at your expense.

This entails more than just structuring the flow of work and well-defined governance processes. It also includes making sure your outsourcers cooperate with your internal teams (the easy part) and making sure your multiple sources cooperate with each other.

Then there’s the little matter of threading the needle between taking maximum advantage of your newfound labor sources’ expertise and making sure they conform to your IT standards and practices.

Want more? Here’s more: head down the path of relying on external sources – any sources other than hiring employees – and you’ll find it won’t be a popular decision. Plan your communication to your IT staff accordingly.

Then, if your sourcing will rely on non-vernacular US English, plan some more, because you’ll find you’re vulnerable to what I have in the past called the “soft bigotry of accents.” Whether your future workforce will include workers with H-1B visas or “Zoom visas,” your own workforce will instinctively gravitate to working with native English speakers, simply because conversations are harder in direct proportion to accents being thicker.

Oh, one last thing: As you plan, make sure to make and reinforce a message to your company’s executive leadership team: None of the goals of your shiny new sourcing strategy will be to save money.

The barriers to effective functioning are high enough without sacrificing the excellence of the IT workforce on the altar of cheaping out.

Perhaps the most controversial topic in any national political arena is Labor Economics. What is the right minimum wage?  Should unearned income be taxed in the same manner as earned income?  Should we solve for a) unemployment, or b) staff shortages? What should companies (and governments, NGOs, etc.) expect to pay, and what should an individual worker expect in terms of work conditions, compensation and mobility?

Labor economics was one of the biggest drivers of the last US election cycle, and probably a lot of other countries as well.

Meanwhile, collaboration and remote access tools keep getting better and better. 25 years ago, companies and tech teams were experimenting with AIM or MS chat, CVS repositories, and SSH, Citrix or RDP remote access tools. (Isn’t it interesting that more modern tools still use a lot of patterns or functions from this era, and even earlier Unix tools?) These tools allowed staff and consultants to work in more locations and powered a diffusion of tech knowledge and outsourcing business growth.

Some years ago, I saw a large company contract with a large offshore based staffing company, and bring in scores of low paid workers on B1 Visas (*illegally), only to rotate them out before they hit the 90 day limit of the visa. Wash, rinse, repeat, as they say. The customer company leadership could claim deniability, if they were pressed, or probably more likely, they would claim that there was a lack of qualified staff that they could draw on legally. There were likely shortages of skilled candidates in this part of the country, and the company certainly wanted to save money as well. The whole situation had a stench that was undeniable.

Let’s now weave the two topics of labor economics and improved connectivity tools.

The real choice isn’t between H-1B visa holders and native-born US citizens for a specific job.

For the near future, the choice is between anybody based in the US,  OR highly connected offshore “consultants” existing in a spectrum of geographies, competencies, levels of integrity, business cultures, language competencies, and, ultimately, risks.

Staff based in the US (visa or not) is priced at a premium (compared to much of the rest of the world), for the conveniences of reliability, ease of communication, legal compliance and security, and improved productivity and effectiveness. (Yes, eventually, the choice will be between a human or an AI, but for our purposes right now we can leave that possibility alone.)

Individuals and companies that engage in the offshore, outsourced model claim that they can offer all of the benefits, but at a much lower costs. Pick an individual or team from a line up, and no visas, no hassles, same outcome. Time zone, education, language, culture, security and liability are all the same.

The debate about H-1B is an interesting discussion, but it’s really just a fraction of the issue, and given the US and international political climate I expect policy makers to pivot the debate to the relatively safer Onshore vs Offshore labor economics discussion. There are, after all, a lot of unhappy constituents and a volatile political mood.

It is unlikely that Offshore labor will be banned (and I don’t know how it could be done), but it is highly possible that tax penalties (labor tariffs?) or other economic sanctions could be considered and implemented. The mood of the US public is frosty towards the rest of the world right now, and the recent elections demonstrate a desire for a different approach. Also consider how much policy and technology has been implemented to bring banks in to assist with law enforcement. The systems have been developed to surveil business activities and monetary transactions, enabling the regulation of these relationships.

None of what I am saying is advocacy, although I will suggest that the argument about H-1B visas is kinda ridiculous, while the offshoring situation is completely unregulated and potentially has the bigger impact. Meanwhile, how do IT leaders like us navigate these staff sourcing situations?

Bob and I will tackle that topic next week.