What’s Unfair about Competition?
Posted: December 16th, 2009 | Author: James P. Cramer | Filed under: Economy, Global practice, Professional practice, Strategy | Tags: BIM, India, outsourcing, work ethic |
Lunch at the Hyatt Regency Dehli, New Dehli, India
A few weeks ago I was in New Delhi, India, where architectural services cost about a fourth as much as they do in North America. This low-cost option has been perceived as the driving reason for the outsourcing phenomenon of the past decade. Some view this as unfair competition.
North American firms have contracted for parts of their technology services to be accomplished overseas. This has created an around-the-clock service model. China and India have become the global leaders and the preferred choice for outsourcing services. Today, some North American and European professional practices have their own captive “insourcing” operations in India and Asia to support their other offices where labor and overhead are often much more expensive.
There are parallels in other professional practice areas. In the management consulting and technology field, U.S.-based management consultancy Accenture says that its firm in India will grow by more than 5,000 staff this year and will surpass 55,000 in India alone. And it predicts continuing growth that will not only serve the growing needs of India but significant parts of the developing world and developed world as well.
There is much more to this story than low cost/high quality talent, however. And this difference is not just about low cost. It is the high level of diligence and work ethic among professionals in India. Little waste in process, focused attention, lean overhead, very latest technology, and speed. Executives travel to client offices via coach class, even for a 15-hour flight. When they book their hotels, it is two to four people per room. They are eager to please, and their enthusiasm for the future of the design professions is contagious. This lean overhead, high work ethic culture has redefined outsourcing of architectural services. We believe it will continue to do so.
While the building information modeling skill levels in India have become legendary in just a few short years, the innovative nature of Indian professional practices is not just a story of technologically advanced practitioners in architecture and engineering.
Indian professionals have catalyzed fundamental change during the world’s recession. They have found new ways of meeting client needs, including meeting those that clients didn’t even know they had. They are eager imagineers of the future of professional practice.
Global innovators see opportunities that others are missing. They find service niches that are changing the face of the architectural and engineering business. Furthermore, they are matching their capabilities and quickly adapting to the world’s changing markets.
There exists no confusion about the impact of outsourcing jobs on the american worker. Every job we outsource to nations with a large number of individuals who work for minimum wage or less, hurts the American people who work for a living.
Paying less seems like a good deal. Please consider that in the United States getting the education is expensive. Getting a license is expensive. Starting a private practice is expensive.
Not being able to recover that expense with good wages eventually renders the entire profession of Architecture helpless. We struggle now to find clients who can engage our services. The working class is locked into a competition with overseas labor rates that simply cannot be won and results in less buying power embodied in the wage each successive year. There are fewer clients each year who can hire Architects for services as the value of their labor falls.
China alone is a huge impact on Architects in the United States. There is almost no economic justification for any private architectural practice to hire interns to do AutoCAD drawings or anything else.
The truth is that outsourcing is the destruction of career potential for every graduating architect candidate seeking an internship. The simple reality is that this ideology is not effective at the bank for Americans and their children. We trade away our future when we outsource jobs. We loose the capacity to replace the professionals we have now. What is the point of the education if it falls victim to a price war no one in America can win?
What’s unfair about competition? Is it a matter of competition or competence?
Jim Cramer heralds the low cost/high quality talents that has motivated the outsourcing of architectural work to Asia and credits it to the high level of diligence, work ethic, and minimal waste in processes resulting in an overall lean overhead. Additionally, their full inclusion of current technologies is applauded as another reason for the migration of architectural jobs to Asia. He makes a convincing argument for outsourcing the current work on BIM and other CAD work.
What I believe is missing in this analysis is a thorough look into the following question; “How can they produce better and cheaper building design and production documentation work in Asia for a building in Alpharetta, Georgia or Springfield, Massachusetts? How the institutions in the Far-East are able to design better buildings for our cities, our culture, and our latitudes than us, who are here with the full understanding of our regional conditions?
Maybe the answer is just this: We are not closer to our land or culture than anybody else in the world. Maybe we treat our buildings as if they were to be located in a place as far away as Asia, or more likely as far from us, as they are from Asia. That may well be how we lost our “unfair” competitive edge in the design of our own buildings. Our utter lack of insight into our own familiarity has made us obtuse to our own backyard.
We will not recover a competitive edge before we are clear about what we need to include in our BIM models to represent our regional, cultural, and social context. Arol Wolford from RCD called it in a meeting the other day: “The Pre-BIM” information.
What is this pre-BIM information? How do we integrate our models to the ecological realities of our specific sites? Such are the questions for the next generational discussion in the American architectural community.
I believe a comprehensive BIM model should include all which is necessary to support building sustainability, its permanence in the in-situ context. Certainly the ecological “threads” of the site should be included, the implications of the lay of the land (the terrain), the social and administrative codes and regulations, its real estate value and insertion in the local economical context, as well as the climactic conditions and the gentle west breezes of autumn. Of all of these attributes, our current BIM models include none.
We need to add to our Building Information Models their roots, the foundation in which are they seating, and then maybe our long living on the land will give us fair advantage on the design, production and maintenance of our buildings. So maybe then we can be again the architects of our cities.