Thursday, October 10, 2013

Utility cuts IT workforce, hires Indian outsourcers

Northeast Utilities (NU) in Connecticut (USA) confirmed plans to outsource IT work to India-based outsourcers; move will affect some 200 jobs

Northeast Utilities confirmed the other day that it plans to turn over part of its IT operations to two India-based outsourcing firms, despite a recent push by state lawmakers to keep it from doing so.

NU says it employs some 400 IT workers, and "will retain about half of those employees" after turning some operations over to outsourcers Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, two of India's largest IT firms.

Click HERE for more details.

Could this be a solution for automation, control, monitoring … ?

Here is another question somebody brought up discussing the NU approach:

“Would you outsource the autopilot to some inexpensive pilot on the ground in some foreign country with cheap labor? No? Then why is anyone even discussing such options for SCADA? And yet, they do!

The problem is education. Many utilities are putting poorly educated, poorly trained staff at the controls of our infrastructure, and then because it fails all the time, are seriously contemplating outsourcing the whole operation to another country.

Outsourcing to the cloud doesn't work. It's not about the technology. It's the people.”

I would add to state that another crucial problem is the education of people that make these decisions to outsource managing our infrastructure.

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