I've been doing a lot at work with Sarbanes Oxley. It's a new government regulation that makes corporate executives liable for bad business practices. The main idea hear is that companies must be able to prove "they know what they know". There should be air tight controls when it comes to how assets and liabilities are created. Reflecting on this, I understand why outsourcing will never consume U.S. IT. The key is that you must build systems with people who care or people who know IT who have strong multi-channel communication (face,group meeting,email,phone,shared documentation) with those who care about the problem a system is trying to solve.

Outsourcing I.T. to other countries is ok for building code that does commodity tasks like sorting a list, sending out a bunch of emails, reusable code libraries and frameworks like Struts, Java Util, Perl Regular Expressions, etc. If you are spending your career building commodity tools, you will be out gunned by the international community. Outsourced IT can share experiences with how they solved problems with problem solvers on IT systems in their own country. The problems in other countries solved by other countries systems may not exactly fit the problems you are trying to solve with a U.S. built system. An example of a system that works well in many countries is the CAR.

The path to a successful IT career involves having a strong bond with those who are trying to solve the problem and to work hand in hand manifesting systems that utilize commodity code to manipulate data to be prepared for human analysis by problem solvers to be certified as knowledge that can be acted on or used as a basis to do things better next time. Do this and you will out compete anyone of your competitors out there who is not doing this or not providing problem solvers with the right information. This is the essense of my slogan "Know How It Works."