Why we wrote this book

Whether one is for it or afraid of it, we are convinced that managing offshoring is a competency that tomorrow's IT managers must learn. We wrote this book to help build that competency.

This book builds offshore competency in the breadth and depth of the material covered here: offshore economics, offshore strategy, offshore legal issues, how to get started in offshoring, and many other critical topics.

By teaming up across the Atlantic (Erran is in the United States, Paul is in The Netherlands), we bring different views and challenged each other's assumptions. We bring different views in other ways, we formed a business-academic alliance (Erran is a professor of business and Paul is a consultant on offshoring). We also invited other experts to contribute: there are eight additional authors and co-authors of some chapters and some cases. For example, we invited an attorney specializing in offshoring, Rebecca Eisner, to author the chapter on offshore legal issues.

We have also collected many real-life examples: nine in-depth cases, all of which are first published here, as well as countless stories and anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book.

This book is also a resource for students and teachers in business and technology programs. As we wrote this book the first offshore outsourcing classes were offered. Today, the topic of offshoring should be a component of any management curriculum.

Finally, we also wrote this book for policy makers and analysts in or around governments.