Late last year, two major IT firms, CGI-AMS and Northrop-Grumman, announced they were bringing more than 700 technology jobs to Lebanon that pay around $50,000 a year. These positions are in the same class as the 112,000 IT jobs nationwide that were lost to overseas outsourcing in 2003, according to Global Insight in Boston.
Other technology companies are also putting high-level programming and data- crunching jobs in rural America locales with less traffic and lower rents to cut costs and remove the legal entanglements, cross-cultural differences, and time-zone hassles that come with overseas outsourcing.
For CGI-AMS and Northrop-Grumman, the decision to set up in Lebanon was mostly driven by high labor costs in hot job markets such as Fairfax, Va., and neighboring Reston in northern Virginia. In another instance, DaimlerChrysler recently hired Lakota Express to do its Web design, which it is sending to a South Dakota Indian reservation. Even Dell, which recently announced another major offshoring gambit, is now shipping some of its work to Twin Falls, Idaho. In Cheyenne, Wy., transportation logistics firms, full of young people, dot the interstate.
Whether this is a trend or a temporary thing is not clear, however, there seems to be opportunities for small communities that are willing to take the plunge.
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