RSSLocation, location, location
The cyclical dust-up over whether anywhere in the world can possibly compete with Silicon Valley as earth-mother for technology startups has kicked off again, this time involving New York City as the putative contender.
Many CIOs, fortunately, are not in a position to have to worry about factors such as investment funding, but most have to deal with other issues of location such as the available pool of technology talent and the lifestyle conditions that allow one to retain such talent as one may attract in the first place. It's interesting to me that this is still the case, though; we are all geeks here, after all, on the cutting edge of network and telecommunication technologies… why is it that we are still so pinned down by where our corporations happen to be physically located?
Of course I am overlooking the offshore outsourcing trend, and that may in fact answer my question in the long term; maybe IT departments are not so tied down as I imagine. Certainly there have been major advances in outsourcing, which has morphed from a strictly development and support resource to full-fledged process fulfillment in recent years. But it still seems that there are these debates over where one is located and the problems of attracting talent to those physical locations.
What's our problem that we haven't knocked out the problem of location yet? So many support operations are run in a dark back office over the phone and with remote desktop technologies, why does that office have to be in the same building as the corporate headquarters? If you can hire better techs in the Valley, why aren't they in a dark back office there, doing the same things over the Internet? This isn't unheard of, I understand, but it still is not the norm, and it is still approached with trepidation by CIOs and CEOs alike. Is this just arcane hangover from the non-technical side of the business? Is there a lack of trust of technology staff with no manager breathing down their neck? What is keeping us so tied to location that we forgo real business advantages simply in order to keep our staff under the same roof?
Location or destination will always be a vital factor, even with the advancements of outsourcing.