Can 'Green Tech' Benefit the U.S. IT Profession? Wisconsin

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Originally published at Internet.com

Subscribers to the New York Times may have noted this Sunday's editorial column by Thomas Friedman, titled "The Green Road Less Traveled." In the column, the journalist and author of books (including The World is Not Flat) argues that there's great opportunity for workers who can put the "smarts" into software and hardware as big IT companies become a major force in delivering the technologies behind efforts to make the world a little greener.

For example, he cites IBM's building of a system for Stockholm to manage traffic congestion as an example of the kind of green technology that is going to be required moving forward, noting that you can't make a product greener without making it smarter.

And that, he said, is where U.S. companies have the edge - in building products "that have a lot of knowledge content in them," rather than products than can just be made cheaply. Those knowledge-dependent jobs, he says, are the hardest to outsource.

What this means, he writes, is "that to the extent that we make 'green' standards part of everything we design and manufacture, we create 'green-collar' jobs that are much more difficult to outsource.'"

There's an entire workforce of U.S. IT pros out there hoping he's right on that count. Indeed, it is still true today that most higher-value IT work gets done stateside. And yet, it is hard to imagine the same big IT companies that can drive technology innovations for a greener world don't ultimately expect more from the investments they themselves are making in offshore IT staff.

Take IBM, just as one example. According to an article published this month in BusinessWeek, IBM employed 3,000 people in India in 2002; today, it employs 53,000 people there, while its U.S. work force has declined slightly. The article cites a smart-grid project IBM is undertaking for Texas's CenterPoint Energy, designed to enhance the efficiency and reliability of its energy operations, as an example of the mix and match of onshore and offshore talent contributing to the project.

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As expected, the stateside IBM IT employees are those with special expertise in the utility business, with software development being done in India. But the article goes on to quote one of those Indian developers who's moved up the ladder and now supervises a team of four programmers writing software for utilities like CenterPoint - and he makes the point that his experience working at IBM is giving him the business and industry expertise to go along with his technical knowledge.

That's not just happening at IBM. At Indian-owned outsourcing firms and other big American companies with a presence there, IT employees are steadily upgrading their skills and expertise. A recent interview with Kevin Campbell, who leads Accenture's global outsourcing business, conducted by The Economic Times, quotes him as saying that, "In India, our aim is to keep delivering high value services at lower costs. We are focusing on productivity and moving up the value chain."

In this case, he wasn't talking about developing talent with a future in what Freidman calls the green-collar workforce, but the point seems clear that programmers and hardware engineers overseas are working to become equally adept at more than just non-mission critical programming tasks.

This isn't happening at every offshore location, of course - China, for instance, is well behind India in terms of the capabilities of its talent pool. And India is having its own problems of late, in terms of rising service costs and tighter competition for talent, with some Indian-owned outsourcers now looking to bulk up their IT talent in the U.S.

As the world goes green, Friedman seems on track in seeing that U.S. IT pros are going to be leading the wave of delivering the expertise that will underpin eco-conscious initiatives, bringing together the bits and bytes to make congestion pricing, energy conservation and other efforts practical and doable.

That's good if it helps to create more popular support for these initiatives. But with real competition out there from offshore sources, being green is no guarantee of eternal job security.