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Outsourcing – whose baby is it, anyway?

April 3, 2009

What are you doing? We are ideating.
You sure would have seen this IBM ad that takes a cheeky dig at companies that that brain storm in a Spartan white ‘idea room.’

Well this time, the joke is on IBM. The world’s largest IT company was forced to withdraw its patent application for, PLEASE DON’T LAUGH, “offshore outsourcing.” This happened after the US Patent & Trademark Office published the company’s latest filing seeking rights to a new ‘method and system for strategic global resource sourcing’ last week.

Reportedly, this is not the first time that IBM has sought to declare its proprietary over, what it ingeniously describes as “qualitative and quantitative factors” that are “non linear” in nature!!!

In 2007, IBM had to withdraw a similar application for “Outsourcing of Services,” after critics put the company on the mat for “violating its policy against filing patents on business methods that lack substantial technical merit.”

This time also IBM U.S. Patent Application 20090083107 talks of a “method and system for strategic global resource sourcing” that deserves protection and goes on to cite five people as “inventors” of this complex, Maths-based outsourcing method! And if you haven’t guessed it already, two of these five inventors happen to be Indians and the other two Chinese!

“An important challenge in shifting to globally integrated enterprises is planning the location and capacity of the global workforce,” IBM’s submitters wrote, cites one media report. Ironically, the US Patent & Trademark Office published the IBM’s second filing on March 30, the same day as the company gave marching orders to several of its employees in the US, according to an article carried by Information Week. “Can I patent my route to office and give it a fancy name of “navigation/…” asks one incredulous commentator.

Appears that recession is taking a heavy toll on IBM. The company is now getting bereft of ideas. It does not realize that innovation and offshoring are processes ingrained in a company’s DNA. In fact, in the new global order, words like “offshoring” and “outsourcing” have turned completely redundant.

“What is offshoring if your company already operates in dozens of markets?” Mark Kobayshi-Hillary asks in silicon.com, which is a good question.


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Comments

One Response to “Outsourcing – whose baby is it, anyway?”

  1. Who owns outsourcing? on April 6th, 2009 9:20 pm

    I don’t understand why IBM wants to patent outsourcing; outsourcing has been happening for several decades in US starting from agricultural then manufacturing and now information technology. I’m glad IBM abandoned its ludicrous attempt to patent outsourcing.

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