10 Useful Blogs on Global Outsourcing

A friend of mine asked me today about the blogs I go to the most for information on outsourcing, so here’s my current list.  I am mostly interested in the IT outsourcing industry in India and China, and this list reflects that.  These blogs offer a diverse set of perspectives, from analysts, project managers, vendor management, advisors and vendors,  and there usually isn’t much overlap in content.  If you want to find more, the blogrolls of each of these blogs offers up a great starting point for lots more related content.

Horses for Sources Phil Fersht does this for a living (he’s an analyst at AMR focused on outsourcing) and it shows.  His blog is updated frequently, covers outsourcing across many domains and the globe, with good insights about trends in the industry, and includes a nice dose of humor.

Pragmatic Outsourcing just got started in August, 2008, but Nick Krum writes from a long history as a an IT project manager who works with outsourcing vendors.  His posts offer detailed information and advice about all the major offshore locations.  Amazing expertise and a balanced viewpoint about the opportunities and risks from a hands-on manager of outsourced services.

Global-O&O is written from India and keeps its finger on the pulse of the outsourcing industry in India, with frequent posts often pulled directly from India’s newspapers, with introductory commentary.  This is a good blog for news about individual companies, such as new contracts, changes in operations, layoffs(!), comments by industry leaders, etc.

Go East- Outsourcing to China tracks the happenings in the IT outsourcing business in China from an industry insider’s perspective.  A great source of info on trends that are often not covered anywhere else.

Consider the Source TPI is one of the top outsourcing advisory firms, and their blog includes posts from several consultants covering a wide range of topics about the industry and outsourcing management.  Much of their content is aimed at buyers of large-scale outsourcing engagements, but is often useful for those involved in smaller scale engagements.

360 Vendor Management This blog has gone dormant, but it still has a dozen or so thorough, well-written articles about vendor management of outsourced IT services in India (mostly).

Heavy Rain Sandeep Sood doesn’t post a lot, but you can use the company blog as a starting point for finding his writing, presentations and comics(!) elsewhere.  Monsoon Company is not your typical Indian IT outsourcing business – it’s based in Berkeley, California, it tends to do more small-scale projects , mostly in web development (e.g., Ruby on Rails).  But Sandeep’s insights on managing global teams apply to the industry as a whole (really, to any global organization), and his writing is sometimes poignant, often funny, worth looking for.

deal architect Vinnie Mirchandani’s blog is about “disruptive trends” in technology in general, but he often writes about outsourcing, and most of his posts cover IT trends that affect outsourcing.

Outsource Portfolio is actually a set of blogs, written by several authors, some of whom are anonymous, so the quality, and your ability to decipher their biases, varies.

Sourcing Magazine is like Grand Central – tons of articles, links, discussion forums, etc., and it’s often hard to get through the crowd to your train.