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Research agency Gartner estimates that in 2002 the total BPO business worldwide was worth US$110 billion and of this amount only US$1.2 billion, or just 1 per cent, was sent offshore to other countries. By 2007, predicts Gartner, the total BPO business will grow to US$173 billion of which US$24 billion or about 14 per cent will be sent to other countries.

$200 bn financial jobs to be outsourced in 2005: Deloitte & Touche

06.30.04 (9:03 pm) [edit]

Over $200 billion worth of financial jobs are likely to be sent offshore to India and other countries in the coming year, according to a survey.

A survey by Deloitte & Touche of 43 financial services companies around the world suggests that the number of firms taking the offshore option increased by 38 percent last year.

In 2005, Deloitte expects the top 100 global financial companies to offshore a total of $210 billion (116 billion pounds) of their operating costs, saving on average, $700 million (388 million pounds).

"Financial institutions are moving business functions to India because they are recognising compelling cost advantages and they are able to lock in savings and manage risks effectively," said Peter Lowes, the US leader of Deloitte's outsourcing practice.

Deloitte also estimated that by 2010, 20 percent of the operating costs of global financial institutions would be centred abroad, reducing costs by about 37 percent.

The findings tally with other studies such as one by analyst Datamonitor earlier this year.

Datamonitor said outsourced, offshore call centre positions will more than double by 2007 to 241,000, from close to 110,000 at the end of last year.

Several investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, have opted for India as an outsourcing centre to reduce costs.

Earlier this year, Barclays, in the first deal of its kind in the British financial services sector, reached an agreement with trade union Unifi for the bank to outsource more call centre and back-office jobs to India.

This tacit admission by the union that the trend was inevitable cleared the way for other UK firms to send jobs offshore, although figures as to how many have been lost are hard to find.

Barclays created 500 back-office jobs in India last year at a cost of 250 British jobs. However, with a strong emphasis on redeployment, only 40 people lost their jobs in this country.

However, the Deloitte survey showed that most of the companies sending jobs to India and other countries had concerns about risk management.

Half of those surveyed had contingency plans if the offshore operation went wrong.

"Risks related to government change and policy changes are prompting companies to have a multiple-country strategy, which makes it easy for them to migrate services if there is a problem in any operation," Lowes said.

Apart from India, other countries with high proficiency in English are emerging as popular destinations, including Malaysia and the Philippines.

Offshoring set to increase by £100bn: Deloitte & Touche

06.29.04 (8:43 pm) [edit]

MORE than £100 billion of operating costs are expected to be sent offshore to low-wage countries in the coming year, according to a Deloitte & Touche survey.

The findings suggest that the number of firms engaged in [b]offshore outsourcing[/b] increased by 38 per cent last year. In 2005, Deloitte expects the top 100 global financial companies to offshore a total of $210bn (£114bn) of their operating costs, saving an average of $700 million (£387m).

"Financial institutions are moving business functions to India because they are recognising compelling cost advantages and they are able to lock in savings and manage risks effectively," said Peter Lowes, leader of Deloitte’s US outsourcing practice.

The art of successful offshore outsourcing

06.28.04 (8:30 pm) [edit]

Even IT executives who have successfully outsourced parts of their companies' services abroad can tell you the road to profitable relations with offshore partners can be painfully bumpy. Just ask Group 1 Software Inc. Vice President of Postal Affairs Tim King, who was forced to pull the plug on two of the four offshore application development pilot projects he initiated in the past 12 months.

"Either, in the design phase, they just didn't get it, or the code they delivered was just not up to our standards," King says.

Fortunately for Group 1, a Lanham, Maryland, data quality and direct marketing software maker, King quickly reassessed Group 1's offshore outsourcing strategy and -- complying with the company's rigorous project approval and management process for offshore contracts -- limited the financial exposure of the aborted relations to under approximately $100,000 each.

Despite these setbacks, King has achieved success with offshore ventures; but he is by no means alone in experiencing failed outsourcing projects. In fact, his case is typical for IT executives pursuing outsourcing relationships, experts say.

"Over half the people we talked to for our own research said that offshore projects failed to achieve full potential for cost savings," says David Foote, president of IT advisory and research company Foote Partners LLC, an IT advisory and research firm in New Canaan, Connecticut.

As with marriage, making an outsourcing project successful requires considerably more effort than simply saying, "I do."

Foote and other IT executives believe offshore project success requires self-examination on the part of the client company to clarify goals and expectations, rigorous project-management discipline, and an understanding of how best to manage communications with everyone involved.

The first step in making an outsourcing relationship work is to analyze your company's outsourcing expectations, says Tony Greenberg, CEO of Ramp Rate^Rate LLC, an IT outsourcing advisor.

"We have a whole series of questions," Greenberg says. "What do you hope to gain from outsourcing -- cost reduction, business transformation? What criteria do you use to identify vendors? Do you truly understand your internal costs?"

There are legal and regulatory questions to consider as well, Greenberg adds, citing the financial reporting requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the medical and insurance reporting requirements for HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

Oftentimes, the best course of action is to stay at home.

"Companies also must realize that ultimately the vast majority of outsourcing is done cost efficiently in the U.S. and that offshore outsourcing is not for everyone," Greenberg says.

Establishing a decision process to define what should and should not be outsourced goes a long way toward avoiding pitfalls down the road, Group 1's King says.

"We wouldn't outsource those things we sell that are regulatory in nature -- for example, a postal coding product. The code has to be in the hands of customers at a certain date in order for them to comply with U.S. postal service regulations," King says.

According to many who contracted offshore services, understanding the real benefits of offshoring and setting reasonable expectations are also important to ensuring success.

Eric Michlowitz, former vice president of strategic services at WorldChain Inc., a Fremont, California, provider of hosted supply-chain applications, says that a truly successful outsourcing initiative will produce advantages beyond mere cost savings. Michlowitz, who had managed WorldChain's relationship with Sierra Atlantic Inc., an offshore service provider with programmers in India, left WorldChain after it was acquired by Optum last month. He is now an analyst of military supply chain issues at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. Michlowitz has held a number of executive positions in IT and says guidelines and lessons learned at WorldChain apply in many situations.

"When you are in a company with demand variability, outsourcing provides burst capacity," Michlowitz says. Companies do not want to spend money to hire extra people to ramp up quickly on projects only to have excess staff when things get slow, he notes.

After a company has set the goals and expectations for an offshore venture, the selection process becomes the next crucial step to success, according to both users and service providers. "It's no use using good people for the wrong purposes," Michlowitz says.

Many client companies look for service providers with credentials such as the CMM (Capability Maturity Model)-level certifications developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. But that's not a guarantee that a provider did not experience staff turnover after the certification was granted.

"You also have to check customer references and see how responsive the companies are in their sales process," says Russ White, CEO of First Index Inc. in Whippany, New Jersey, which uses a Web-based application to match buyers and sellers of manufacturing components.

First Index ended up selecting Epam Systems Inc. -- a services provider based in Lawrenceville, N.J., with programmers in Russia, Hungary, and Belarus -- over several Indian providers. Now Epam maintains First Index's Web-based application for matching buyers and suppliers of manufacturing components.

"Epam really did their homework, sent people to visit us, while the other firms came across as somewhat arrogant even though I know they wanted our business," White says.

Although preliminary analysis and choosing the right provider are crucial, industry observers agree that many offshore projects fail without hands-on management.

"This may sound obvious, but probably the biggest stumbling block to offshore outsourcing is that after all the contracts have been signed, companies abdicate responsibility for projects to the outsourcer," Deepak Khandelwal, analyst of business process outsourcing at business consulting and research firm McKinsey & Co., said during a forum in New York at the CeBIT America show in May.

"Companies that outsource forget that they still have to manage the projects they outsource. Communication is key: You need to have your weekly meetings with the project managers and the quarterly meetings at the CEO or [executive vice president] level," Khandelwal said.

"It's not just a matter of calling somebody and giving them work and forgetting about it," says Manoj Kunkalienkar, executive director and president of ICICI Infotech, an IT services provider based in Edison, N.J., with facilities in India. "You have to set up processes and take into account time differences and distances."

According to Group 1's King, his company has executive-level meetings to give the green light to projects they expect will cost more than $100,000. King's division, which includes a little more than 50 staff members, has a five-member project management team that reviews code developed by service providers on a regular basis. Group 1 typically pays for work on delivery.

Those management policies have aided in the development of several successful offshore outsourcing projects, mainly with Headstrong, an IT consulting and services company based in Fairfax, Va., with programmers in the Philippines, among other locations.

King and other outsourcers agree that there is no one type of contract that fits all projects. Payment for the building of a specific application or piece of an application is usually not based on time but on the completion of the project and is sometimes portioned out through milestones, King says. For maintenance projects, King and representatives of Headstrong usually confer on how much work will be needed and agree on an annual fee.

Most users of offshore services warn about open-ended contracts based on payment terms for hourly wages. "You have to be careful of scope creep," former WorldChain executive Michlowitz says. SLAs, which typically outline a time frame for specific deliverables, can help put a check on scope creep, he adds.

Although contracts and SLAs are important for ensuring that specific code is delivered on time and on budget, many industry insiders believe communication is often what determines the long-term success or failure of an outsourcing project.

Communicating with offshore providers can be hampered by cultural differences. A common observation is that Americans and Indians tend to communicate differently. Offshore experts believe that, on the whole, Americans tend to be informal and expansive, whereas Indians tend to focus on topics and discuss them point by point. "[Indians] will give you exactly what you ask for, so it's a literal kind of thing," ICICI Infotech's Kunkalienkar says. Although that can often be advantageous for the outsourcing client, it can sometimes lead to misunderstandings.

"Often problems are more a matter of cultural differences. Simply things like the wording of an e-mail can be misinterpreted," Kunkalienkar says. "An American might send a long e-mail and get a two-liner in reply and think, 'Is the person hiding something?' That's why conference calls are a good thing to do."

Establishing clear lines of internal communications on the client side is also vital to offshore success.

"Companies need to communicate both externally and internally," Foote notes. "But they do a lot of things that almost guarantee that there's going to be a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in their organizations. They tell Wall Street that they're going to be reducing costs and then fail to communicate to their own employees how that is going to affect them. Some of people they end up wanting to keep get so pissed off by process that they split."

Group 1's King agrees, saying offshore outsourcing has become a fear factor for many employees.

"When you talk about outsourcing, a lot of people freak out. Our strategy is not to replace jobs but to supplement what we have, to be more cost-effective," King says. "Our mantra for some time has been to do more with less, and we've tried to be up front about that. You have to be candid and gain credibility, and that goes a long way."

[b][i]Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service, New York Bureau[/i][/b]
* Marc Ferranti is executive news editor for the IDG News Service. *
[LINE]
[LINE]

Setting a course for offshore

06.27.04 (10:39 pm) [edit]

[i]The Carlson School at the U joins a handful of business schools offering a class in outsourcing jobs overseas[/i]

As he studies for his MBA, Jeremy Esensten, a project manager for American Express Financial Advisors, wants to learn more about offshore outsourcing.

By visiting companies in India, the 29-year-old part-time student at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management plans to get a closer look at how to manage an outsourced work force and how the workplace compares to that in the United States.

If things work as planned, Esensten and other Carlson students will spend two weeks in Bangalore, a major hub of global business, getting a behind-the-scenes view of outsourcing from the perspective of managers in local and global professional service firms.

"My company is so involved in it already, it's good for my own growth to have that knowledge and be familiar with it," he said.

Outsourcing jobs overseas has moved into the corporate mainstream, and now it's moving into the classroom. This fall, Carlson will join a small but growing list of business schools launching so-called "Offshoring 101" courses.

Schools are recognizing that the strategy — even though it has sparked renewed political debate as its reach extends to a broader range of jobs — has settled in for good at U.S. businesses looking to stay competitive.

"Over the next year, I think every major business school will have courses on outsourcing," said Amar Gupta, a professor who developed an offshoring course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

Whether offshoring is taking a meaningful bite out of the U.S. jobs market is sharply contested. A recent U.S. Labor Department report concluded that a relatively small percentage of job loss here can be attributed to outsourcing overseas.

Clearly, a growing number of companies are embracing the practice.

IBM and the consulting firm Accenture alone plan to add close to 9,000 jobs in India by the end of 2005, according to Forrester Research, a Massachusetts-based firm.

Forrester now projects 830,000 U.S. service jobs will move overseas by the end of 2005, a 40 percent increase over its original estimate. The research firm projects that by 2015, 3.4 million U.S. services jobs will move offshore.

Armed with their business and overseas contacts, a group of Indian faculty members at Carlson is now developing "Managing Globally," the offshoring class the school plans to launch this fall.

The way it is now envisioned, Carlson students will take the outsourcing class in the fall and then travel to India to connect with students at the Indian Institute of Management, a business school based in Bangalore.

By the time they meet face to face, the students will have completed a case study together across the time zones. That will be followed by visits to Indian outsourcing giants Infosys and Wipro and to the call centers and other operations that U.S.-based companies have set up in India.

Kyle Marinkovich, 29, a Carlson student interested in taking the offshoring class, said he wants to learn more about the work environment and the skill level of the workers in India.

The topic is not going away, he said.

"So many people don't realize what stocks they have in their 401(k)s and their pension funds," Marinkovich said. "They demand a certain level of return. The only way these companies can maintain those levels of return is to remain competitive.

"In a lot of ways, offshoring isn't an option," he said. "It's a necessity in the competitive landscape that these firms operate in."

Mani Subramani, a Carlson professor who once worked at the leading Indian supplier Wipro, will teach the school's offshoring course.

Studying the strategy of companies with operations in India such as Honeywell and American Express will help students gain a better understanding of just how value is created through the practice of offshoring.

"There's going to be interest," he said of the course. "The kind of people who recognize the value in this class are the part-time students who are in the workplace and see the urgency of these issues day to day."

The idea behind the offshoring courses is to understand the implications of moving jobs overseas, the cultural differences and technical challenges of getting work done.

As more companies peel away noncore operations — including call centers and human resources work — managers have to adapt to a changing corporate structure, said Robert Kauffman, chairman of the information and decision sciences department at Carlson. "I believe the management of vendor relationships is a critical skill that graduate MBAs have to have under their belt," he said.

When MIT offered its first course last spring, students who missed out of the 55 available spots lined up at the door the first day, said Gupta, the MIT professor.

Gupta also led a separate trip to India to visit multinational companies that operate there. Students met with policy makers. The trip was meant to underscore business opportunities in India and for students to learn more about outsourcing.

In his classes, Gupta points out, he doesn't advocate a certain position but presents the pros and cons so students can make better decisions in their jobs.

"What we want to impart to the students is that outsourcing is here to stay," he said. "Irrespective of where they are posted in the world, they are going to have to manage multiple constituencies from around the world."

A handful of other schools, such as New York University's Stern School of Business, have started to address the topic. Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., also just started a class in the spring on information tech outsourcing, which includes a trip to India.

Not all MBA programs are convinced that separate classes on the topic are necessary. Some believe that it can be covered as topics in existing coursework.

The University of St. Thomas, for example, addresses the topic as it comes up in any number of business classes.

"Our present thinking is that putting all of that into a course might actually be a bit of overkill," said Christopher Puto, dean of the St. Thomas College of Business. "We have a variety of courses that include overseas experiences and elements of that topic arise in these courses. At the present time, we don't see the need for a full-blown course."

[b]Julie Forster
Pioneer Press[/b]

Critics Of Offshore Outsourcing Will Get Over It: Meta Group

06.22.04 (7:49 pm) [edit]

Outrage over offshore outsourcing will largely disappear in a couple of years, a research and consulting firm has declared.

Indeed, along those lines, the line between the [b]offshore outsourcing[/b] and domestic outsourcing is already blurring, META Group said

“The context in which 'offshore outsourcing' typically is used is completely misleading and simplistic,” META analyst Stan Lepeak wrote in a report released Tuesday. “For every company establishing offshore outsourcing relationships in India, there is a foreign company establishing offshore outsourcing relationships in the United States.”

“Offshore outsourcing represents a continuation of an ongoing economic evolution, and multiple perspectives -- not just laid-off workers -- must be considered when assessing its overall impact and value proposition,” wrote Lepeak, vice president of outsourcing and service provider strategies at the analyst firm.

The fury over offshore outsourcing will peak and then through acquisition and organic growth the line between the offshore outsourcing phenomenon and domestic outsourcing will blur and largely disappear by 2006/2007, Lepeak said.

Enterprises should take advantage of all global resources whether they be supplies, capabilities and efficiencies and locations whether they be in North America, Europe of the Asia Pacific region, he said. Outsourcing in general, he added, represents a long term shift in the ways in which organizations gain and maintain competitive advantage.

[b]TechWeb News[/b]

Critics Of Offshore Outsourcing Will Get Over It: Meta Group

06.22.04 (7:49 pm) [edit]

Companies underestimate cost of offshore outsourcing

06.21.04 (11:48 pm) [edit]

Companies looking to outsource applications, development and maintenance (ADM) have not fully considered all the costs.

That's the conclusion of recent research from Meta Group Inc., which surveyed 150 senior IT executives across Europe on the implications of outsourcing. The survey found that 80 percent of companies had suffered problems and that about 30 percent had made no plans for the cost savings that they could make -- even though more than half of the organizations surveyed had said cost had been the key driver.

According to Paul O'Neill, VP of Meta Group Europe, organizations have a habit of making decisions without considering all the consequences. He said that they looked to move offshore because of cost savings but didn't have a clue as to what level of savings they could actually expect. "There just seem to be some vague idea of saving money," he said.

The research showed that 80 percent of organizations have suffered problems ranging from time and cost overruns, to non-adherence to specifications and requirements, when outsourcing ADM projects.

O'Neill identified several key areas in particular where organizations failed to plan properly. "Companies have to be careful about giving away information about their business processes to a third party." He pointed that it wasn't just a question of signing an outsourcing deal on its own and organizations had a lot of work to do non-disclosure agreements.

He thought that too many companies believed the hype and thought they could achieve 40 percent cost savings when the real figure might be closer to 15 percent.

At least there's a level of consistency across Europe. Meta Group found no differences between any of the countries surveyed.

[b]IDG News Service[/b]

U.S. Workers Don't See Offshoring as Threat to Themselves, Says Study

06.15.04 (3:59 am) [edit]

While 66 percent of U.S. workers believe that offshore outsourcing of jobs is bad for the U.S. economy, an overwhelming 84 percent believe that it is not likely that their jobs would be moved to an offshore location, according to a national poll of 2,814 workers released recently by Hudson.

Even the minority (15 percent) of workers who feel that their jobs could be exported are optimistic about their own job prospects. Nearly half of them believe that their next job will be better than their current one. Furthermore, nearly 60 percent of workers believe that their companies are more likely to outsource jobs to American companies and entrepreneurs in order to achieve cost savings and reduce payrolls rather than moving jobs overseas.

"We were surprised by the strength of the sentiment against offshore outsourcing despite the limited personal impact reported by the workforce," said Jeff Anderson, senior vice president of Hudson Global Resources. "In fact, half of the surveyed workers opposed the practice so strongly that they advocate government penalties on companies that outsource jobs to offshore locations."

The poll reveals a contrast in attitudes on offshoring among manufacturing and service workers. While 33 percent of manufacturing workers believe that their jobs could be moved to another country, only 11 percent of service workers shared this view.

Interestingly, 54 percent of manufacturing workers believe that their company is more likely to outsource jobs within the U.S. to save costs and reduce payroll, in comparison to 27 percent who said that if given a choice their company would move jobs overseas.

[b]SOURCES[/b]

Don't worry about outsourcing to India: Gartner

06.13.04 (9:20 pm) [edit]

Garner has advised Australia to concentrate on getting offshore work for "higher-end, creative projects" and not compete with low-cost and "high-skilled" nations like India, says a media release from the research firm.

Gartner analyst Partha Iyengar suggests Australia consider:

Building business continuity and secure facilities;
Exploiting secure software development status with the United States;
Developing vertical and niche software solutions;
Building partnerships with global software and service leaders; and
Deliver consulting and services to growing Asian economies

Iyengar, to speak at Gartner's Application Development, Integration & Web Services Summit later this week, sees the value of software development going offshore doubling to $US50 billion in the next three years.

Iyengar, vice-president of Gartner India, says Australia's backlash against offshore outsourcing to countries such as India and the Philippines has come as a surprise, adding "this practice (of offshore outsourcing) has been in Australia for only two years, and already we are seeing a similar scale of reaction (like in the US, where there is a 15-year history of the same)."

He says, "In America, criticism has come against a background of the 9-11 disaster and a weak economy, so it is easier to understand their motivation. In Australia, it is harder to comprehend. The local economy has been strong and there is no evidence of any significant job losses because of offshore outsourcing."

"However, it is certainly healthy to have a debate about the security risks of offshore outsourcing."

The firm also refutes claims that offshore outsourcing has reached epidemic proportions, saying only 1.6 percent of the global $US580 billion outsourcing market goes offshore.

Rising U.S. labor costs set challenge to business

06.03.04 (7:56 pm) [edit]

[b]By Anupama Chandrasekaran[/b]

A continued sharp rise in labor costs could spell trouble for U.S. companies, but experts say they still have ways to deal with the issue.

Government data released on Thursday showed that U.S. hourly compensation climbed a revised 4.6 percent in the first quarter, exceeding gains in productivity and pushing production unit labor costs higher.

The data may show workers are getting more of an expanding profit pie, but could also signal quickening inflation.

But with a relatively high jobless rate, productivity gains, and the possibility of outsourcing to cheap offshore centers like China and India, companies have some wiggle room.

Hank McKinnell, chief executive of pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. (PFE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , said on a Business Roundtable conference call on Wednesday that rising wage rates could hurt profit margins, but that higher productivity rates could offset that.

"Even though you are paying higher wages, you are getting more goods and services out on the other end in exchange," McKinnell said.

Rising health-care costs should also curb wage hikes this year. Health-benefit consultant Hewitt Associates predicts an 18 percent rise in health-care premiums, which would make it the fourth straight year of double-digit rises.

Companies have been trying to pass on some of these rising costs to employees or trade them for lower wage increases.

"Our success at the bargaining table is challenged by rising health-care costs," said Bret Caldwell, a spokesman for the powerful Teamsters Union. "We are seeing more and more money that could go to wage increases being diverted to health care and pensions."

This year, employees in sectors such as banking, computer and electronic products, manufacturing and utilities will get pay increases in the range of 3.3 percent to 3.7 percent, according to WorldatWork, an Arizona-based compensation research group.

This is far less than rises of as much as 5.2 percent seen in the same sectors when the economy was booming in 1998.

But some experts say that even small wage increases could eat into profits because labor costs comprise such a big slice of costs.

BOSSES STILL CALLING THE SHOTS

Over the last three years, U.S. companies have managed to survive the economic downturn by aggressively slashing costs and shrinking their work forces.

These measures boosted corporate profits by 31.5 percent in the first quarter over the same period in 2003, according to U.S. government data.

While this growth is spurring hiring, the number of job applicants still far exceed the number of openings at most companies.

"The supply of labor is pretty good out there from a corporation's perspective," said Marty Somelofske, a principal at consulting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP. "The net result is that they are able to give relatively modest increases and attract an appropriate labor pool."

The ability to move call center, accounting, equity research and even medical research jobs to low-wage countries is making it tougher for employees to demand pay increases.

"In every bargaining round and every employment drive the company will tell them (employees) that if you form a union or make these demands, then we are gone, we are leaving," said Ron Blackwell, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, the umbrella U.S. labor union federation. "The exit threat is very powerful."

Although companies can rest assured that wage increases will be modest this year, the balance could eventually tilt in favor of employees and job seekers as an aging U.S. population and other demographic changes lead to a shortage of workers.

"The state of our education system, particularly in the math and science area, says to me that people seeking engineers, computer specialists are going to have a tough time finding the people they need," Pfizer's McKinnell said.

[b]REUTERS[/b]

The BLOG will keep track of the latest Offshore Outsourcing moves and news! This is an attempt to get closer to the market and verify actually whats happening! SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS AND IDEAS ABOUT THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE INDUSTRY IN DISCUSSION.

"Tax return outsourcing gives the accounting firm the chance to keep its preparation business and remain competitive," said Allan Koltin, president of Practice Development Institute, a practice management consulting firm based in Chicago. "I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the norm in the next couple of years." - Accounting Today, March 2003