Both parents, however, are at the stage of life where they're more likely to experience hospitals from a customer's, rather than an employee's perspective. I called Mom today to check in on her progress after surgery a couple months back. (No, it's not the first time I've called her since then. Even I'm not such a horrid child as that.) For the record, she's back out in the yard, shelling walnuts, fully up-to-date on the doings of the wild critters and feral cats, etc. Business as usual, in other words.
Mom mentioned that the hospital where she'd worked until a couple years back had asked her if she was interested in volunteering. She said "no." Which didn't surprise me--she has enough going on right now, even without recuperating from her third surgery in three years. But then I had an ear-full about everything her former employer has outsourced since she started working there--which, for context, was during the Carter Administration.
Food service, IIRC, was the first to go. Now housekeeping has been outsourced. So has billing. Because, of course, nutrition has nothing to do with health. And neither does cleanliness. (My Gentle Reader naturally picked up on the sarcasm there.) And when, thanks to data-sharing limitations, my Mom is batted like a ping-pong ball between Accounts Receivable and at least two insurance companies when she's still half-whacked-out on painkillers, I'm going to take a dim view of outsourced billing. [sharpens fingernails] [bares teeth]
I have a lot of fond memories of visiting that place when I was growing up: The smell of acetone, the superball-bouncy scrambled eggs in the cafeteria, the stately pace of the elevators, the brain-in-a-jar in the Histology lab (true story). But I can also understand why Mom turned them down, too. So far as I can tell, it's still a clean, orderly, almost nurturing place. But the ghosts of the nuns who built and poured their devotion into it become more transparent with every contractor who slings an ID-card lanyard around their neck.
Fast-forward a generation--meaning me--and press the "zemblanity" button, and there's today's news about IBM selling its semiconductor business to GlobalFoundries. It's certainly not unprecedented, given IBM's sell-off of its PC/laptop business to Lenovo a few years back and some of its server business earlier this year. Except that this isn't your typical offshoring:
GlobalFoundries will take over IBM manufacturing facilities in New York and Vermont, and the company "plans to provide employment opportunities for substantially all IBM employees at the two facilities who are part of the transferred businesses, except for a team of semiconductor server group employees who will remain with IBM."
Thus, at least in the near term, GlobalFoundries will employ IBM expats at IBM facilities to make a profit at what, for IBM, was a money-pit. And IBM's taking a sesqui-billion-dollar hit on the deal besides. Slow-clap for IBM management there. (Sarcasm again, btw.)
Granted, I haven't seen the inside of the Blue Zoo since Lou Gerstner was yanking the platinum ripcord on his golden parachute. And, even then, being "contractor scum" insulated me from the insane (unpaid) overtime and pension-jigging and attrition-by-early-retirement and other assorted idiocies inflicted by the buscuit-salesman. But my frustration really boils down to one similar to Mom's. Namely, that the definition of "core competence" has become dangerously strict.
Now, I'm certainly not arguing in favour of vertical monopolies. The fact that Monsanto is allowed to GMO a seed specifically optimised for the petro-chemical atrocities they market frankly blows my mind. As Bruce Sterling put it, "Teddy Roosevelt would jump down off Mount Rushmore and kick our ass from hell to breakfast for tolerating a situation like this." And he's absolutely right--even when he was talking about software monopolies.
Maybe I've just been out of the server space for too long. For all I know, pushing mission-critical data off-site to cloud servers doesn't give CIOs the willies it would have given them a decade ago. Maybe Microsoft has finally earned enough enterprise-computing street-cred to muscle out the Big Iron in the server-room.
But I do know that outsourcing always entails friction and a certain amount of bridge-burning. In the case of Mom's ex-employer, it's orders of magnitude easier and less expensive to retrain (or, if necessary, fire) a under-performing employee than it is to cancel a contract and find a replacement when work isn't up to snuff. When you're a technology company that's weathered two decades of commodisation in both hardware and software by optimising one for the other, throwing away that balance makes no strategic to me.
When I look at the risk of things IBM flags as higher-margin (cloud, data and analytics, security, social and mobile), there is not one of them that I would flag as being "owned" by Big Blue. (Cloud? Amazon. Data? Oracle, with Microsoft hot on their heels. Analytics? Everybody's a "big data" guru these days. Security? Nope. Social? Please...who isn't gunning for Facebook? Mobile? Are we seriously expecting for an IBM phone?)
I owe IBM credit for making me a decent technical writer and for teaching me basic white-collar survival skills. Oh, and for disabusing me of the notion that working inside the belly of the leviathon is securer than working outside it. But apart from my comrades and the cafeteria/coffee-shop/cleaning ladies, there's no love lost for the big blue behemoth on my end.
Yet it galls me to see a company that lionised its R&D department (and the patent lawyers who filed every brain-wave thereof) hitching their wagons to other people's horses. Or, perhaps more aptly, jumping onto other bandwagons. Because bandwagon-passengers forfeit their right to drive, right?
