Rural Sourcing: IT’s Onshore Alternative is based on a Web Forum presentation given by Monty Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton is the Chief Executive Officer of Rural Sourcing Inc. Rural sourcing is quickly picking up steam as a cost-effective alternative to offshore outsourcing.

This report takes a look at some cost comparisons and how using an onshore resource helps your bottom line. Learn about the rural sourcing market in terms of size and what companies are involved around the country. Find out what IT, consumer, and global economic factors are contributing to this growing trend. Discover some additional domestic sourcing benefits, on top of lower costs, like quicker times to market, time zone advantages, and reduced compliance risk.

Members can download the full report (and hundreds of other reports on a variety of IT topics) by logging into The IMF website and visiting our Reports section. In this brief passage, Mr. Hamilton discusses how IT’s changing landscape has made rural and domestic sourcing a more attractive option:

“The way IT projects are being approached these days is making a profound, long-term impact on the outsourcing market. Many companies have already invested a significant amount of time and resources implementing some kind of ERP package. With larger, multi-year initiatives like ERP out of the way, those companies have now moved onto smaller, more niche software investments. These projects have shorter run times, quicker times to market, and more collaboration between the businesses. Agile methodology has become very popular with those projects. A waterfall methodology just doesn’t adapt well to more market-driven, consumer-driven systems. Think about a traditional waterfall approach where you have to collect requirements, document them, send them off to someone else for development, and in a couple of years you receive something your users will hopefully appreciate. Most of that work has disappeared and we’re moving into an era of new buying patterns and products with SaaS models and cloud delivery.

 

When I speak with CIOs, one issue that is top of mind for them is the decentralization of IT. We spent the last couple of decades centralizing the IT function and having CIO’s own that function. They put a lot of processes and standardization tools in place. However, now we’re beginning to see the marketing and sales departments swipe their credit cards, buy new software tools, and implement them on the spot. There’s no arguing this kind of “Shadow IT” is influencing the IT landscape.”