McCombs TODAY

Op-ed by CIBER’s Deirdre Mendez and David Platt

The Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) and The University of Texas at Austin’s South Asia Institute (SAI) will team up on Nov. 14 to offer a workshop in Houston on Assessing and Managing Business Risk in India. The workshop is the latest in CIBER’s series of Strategic Insight events designed to make world-class expertise available to the Texas business community through partnership with UT area studies centers.

Outsourcing customer support, software development and back-office functions to India has been a prominent cost saving strategy of the past decade, but less than a third of respondents to PwC’s Global Outsourcing Survey in 2007 said their India projects had delivered as promised. Operations established by U.S. companies there are often hampered by the country’s complex bureaucracy, heavily burdened physical infrastructure and political uncertainty.

This workshop offers something different from the garden-variety seminars on doing business in India.  Drawing insights from cutting-edge research on South Asia’s economic, political and cultural environment, and offering a distillation of UT’s research on outsourcing issues, the speakers will address the sometimes disappointing results of outsourcing programs to India and will propose ideas to help address the issues that often lead these programs to underperform expectations.

Register for the conference.