Dell Hell

Well, where to start. At the beginning seems a good place. I bought a new laptop before Christmas after my old one appeared to die an inglorious death. A Dell seemed to be a good idea (I was relying on their old reputation), and so I ordered one. 15 days later it arrived, but with a couple of faults.

Offshore Call Centres Are Not Great Experiences ....

This was the start of a wonderful adventure via a very polite, but totally inept, help and support sections in Bangalore. I soon discovered that being able to speak 'Inglish' and understand English are two completely separate matters. They listened and thanked me for my custom, which apparently was "valued", but they then proceeded along the line of least discomfort for them. i.e. They resolved nothing.

Four or Five phone calls and well over 35 emails later, I finally snapped and started hunting for someone in Dell Europe or US who could possibly take responsibility for the issues and resolve them. It took a while but eventually I found a customer advocate in the US (there being no such thing for UK customers) named Todd, who, whilst he couldn't do anything himself as I was a non US customer, passed me over to a lovely lady in Eire, who took matters in hand. I am now awaiting a replacement machine.

Of course it means I have had to clean out all my work and documents from the machine, wipe the unused memory and restore to factory settings (Ctrl F11 on Dell screen if you are interested). I did this mainly because one never knows where the machines are going to end up, and there are some cunning West Africans out there.

Anyway, whinging aside, this set me thinking on the predictions of the growth of the Indian economy based on "I.T." and call centres. I discussed this with a beer buddy, who also works in I.T. and we both easily came up with examples of out sourced programming sent to India, and then requiring a full time UK team to 'fix it' when it comes back from the Indian programmers. Couple this with the anecdotal stories about call centre problems similar to the one I have just detailed, and one begins to suspect that the Indian dream economy is based on smoke and mirrors.

The motivations for work being sent to India (and other similar sites) is the low cost, the availability of English speakers and the number of "graduates" (BA Calcutta failed?). Accountants love this, and proudly claim their bonuses based on the number of job losses in the UK, US or other Western economies. However the real costs e.g. the lost customer goodwill of anyone having problems getting themselves understood, or the hidden project costs of having to correct all the work in the UK when it arrives from these sites, are never shown against the "savings" made by low wage costs.

In reality there are actually no savings, and the fact that many of these call centres are being returned to the UK or US, indicates that firms are beginning to twig that "all the glitters is not gold". One bank in the UK is now advertising the fact that its call centres are in the UK, in order to capitalise on the general ill will that these overseas call centres have created with those firms who persist in using them.

The I.T. work in India will persist for a while, because Corporation bean counters use formulas that indicate the these divisions are "Gold Rated" because they hit all the check points, whilst the western staff are "always late delivering". The fact that they are late because they are having to correct the work done in India, in order to deliver the product, does not show up on these formula charts and is therefore not obvious.

I will give an example: A large multinational corporation (who I can't name for legal reasons), out sourced their code development for a particular project to a third world country. They told them that they had to meet a list of criteria and benchmarks, such as documentation standards, reviews, walk-throughs, feedback etc etc. Every couple of weeks they asked the developers if they had performed this task, or met that check point, and the answer was always "Yes". Rave reviews of this Gold Rated division were passed around the organisation as all the check points, and benchmarks, were met or exceeded. After three months the product delivery date was approaching, and the product was to be passed over for user testing. So the head office rang up the development division and said "we are really pleased with your performance in meeting all our criteria, and we want to know when you can pass the product over for testing" ... and it was at this point that the developers said "it's not ready".

After further discussion it turned out that they had not written one line of code. They had spent the whole three months meeting the documentation standards, and had done nothing else. Gold Star, Gold star, crap! The contract was cancelled, and the multinational had to buy in UK Contractors to do a rush job, so that they could deliver something to the customer. There is a moral to this tale but I leave that for the accountants out there to explain.

This was a bit of a digression, but I think that there are indications that the Indian economy is being built on a quick sand of delusions concerning the quality of their work, and the cultural differences that speaking a similar language can't hide. Unlike China, were the work ethic far exceeds many western economies, and things work, the Indian model is just a facade built on top of a crumbling infrastructure.

I am aware that this thought is based upon nothing more than an observation of a couple of instances, but I suspect that I am not the only one to have come across these types of examples. 

Outsourcing Makes False Savings

Of course until the small child pointed out that he was stark naked, The Emperors "New Clothes" were being praised. So until someone points out the flaws, the Indian economy will be praised as a "miracle", and Western companies will continue to outsource based on false savings.