Architectural Outsourcing
Information Technology continues to touch the way we live; our everyday activities and interactions are facilitated by the technology. Technologies position our daily activities in an increasingly global context: the practice of architecture is not untouchable to this new paradigm. Technology presents new scenarios for Workshare and defines the way in which a design is developed, communicated, and realized.
December 25th, 2006 Time Magazine announced the award for Person of the Year: YOU, the general public. Web firms such as YouTube, Wikipedia, or Facebook are just some of themost successful examples for these web portals that open the door to accessing and exchangingdigital information in all possible modes (written, audio, and visual) at an exceptionally efficientspeed.
In a commercial context, the internet facilitates the export of highly skilled jobs to regions where labor is cheaper. Today, work association no longer implies personal interaction. Technology has made possible ordinary virtual communications, accelerating information transfer and influencing working methodologies. This is the virtual office: physical space usurped by work space in the internet. Architects are not only facing a promising business opportunity, but a new practice model that will revolutionize the professional practice scenario. Firms increasing specialization towards either design or production will shift the economics of practice, stressing design and creativity as core values and commoditizing production and repetitive but still necessary tasks.
Global economy has provided many opportunities for new innovative businesses and has opened up a space for efficient access to resources. Architectural practice, like many other fields, is evolving at a fast rate. Consequently, a new understanding of architecture and its practice is increasingly focused on strategically improving business performance. The field represents a unique situation: while architectural practice is quickly becoming a global and open-sourced practice, the physical artifact of architecture continues to serve as the physical manifestation of a community’s identity and aspirations.
Architects are beginning to assimilate and integrate innovative processes into their practice that would be impossible without technological advancements. These contemporary practice methods have significantly impacted the architectural profession by precipitating an evolution in architects’ traditional practice protocols. Principles from these innovative working methods and technologies enable firms to survive by adapting to external changes and maintaining a sustainable advantage in architectural practice. Architectural practice is increasingly dependent on the larger international context, and therefore frequently necessitates dispatching team members to remote locations.
The field of architecture is continuously evolving following the changes dictated by contemporary societies, where consumerism and change provokes a new conception of architecture. Today, clients of architects are focusing their interests on project issues such as process efficiency and business performance to the detriment of individual interpretations of architecture. Economics and market conditions tend to prevail over design intentions and aesthetic goals. Maximizing the potential of the architectural outsourcing practice model for each architectural firm will require strategic approaches to architectural practice as a service, as well as a business.
Fulfilling current requirements in the management of architectural projects demand the establishment of teams and tasks spanning organizational boundaries as a strategic practice for business results. This task may seem much simpler than it really is. Many issues for multi-team architectural production such as communication, Workshare, and trust, frequently become problematic for reasons beyond our control. Such problems may arise even when dealing with traditional teamwork models. Therefore, when one replaces the often-decisive factor of personal interaction with the virtual alternative in a multidisciplinary team, the challenges become even more complex.
The very need for Workshare arises from the diversity of skills and opinions required to formulate an architectural work. Inevitably architects find themselves working in teams with other members, and these team building experiences help form an overall collective identity.
Today team members are not necessarily required to work together in the same physical space, since communication technologies have enabled efficient interaction at a distance. In fact, personal interaction in architectural Workshare has evolved greatly with time. As remote teams develop the capabilities to collaborate effectively in ways that do not jeopardize the process of logical project development, personal interaction within architectural teams takes on a different significance. The banal transfers of information that once took place between desks in one office now take place many times daily via digital interaction between workstations around the globe. Personal interaction between such parties may be reserved for more significant meetings to initiate or substantiate relationships or to perform checks on a project’s progress.
Some of basic tenants of architectural design over the last fifty years are called into question by globalization’s continual flattening of the world. Significantly, the geographical dispersion of project teams precipitates the displacement of the architectural context as a basic guideline for design. The fact that people from diverse and remote locations and cultures contribute to a given project’s development has significant implications for practice. This also presents the risk that individual contributors who are employed from remote areas may lack essential contextual knowledge not only about a specific project, but also about its local building industry and its local culture.
This new definition of contemporary architecture, as uprooted or displaced from its context, is by no means insignificant: it identifies the interpretation of the current global society by contemporary architects within the framework of the era of globalization.
This changing definition of architectural practice, as something that occurs potentially on many continents at once by many different parties, has contributed to the lack of transparency that outsourcing has received in the discipline. Secrecy has shrouded outsourcing, even when the processes being outsourced were highly auxiliary. Authorship has traditionally been at the core of architectural production, whether by an individual principal in a firm or by a core of designers who work under a collective title. Outsourcing may be viewed as putting traditional values of authorship and remuneration in crisis. However, outsourcing may be studied as an outgrowth of the traditional partnerships that have taken place within individual studios or firms.
While globalization has impacted the way architects work together and therefore their relationship to traditional cues for the design process, the growing global economy puts pressure on the discipline to be more oriented toward the consumer. Changes in the field of architecture echo the trends in all of the design fields where radical improvements in communications and technology have enabled a democratization of design. Consequently, the general public has changed its perception of and value placed on design. Today, availability and affordability are the criteria influencing consumer choices about design. As happened in fashion and in furniture design, the new economic implications are turning design products of all types into commodities.
Architectural design is encountering a similar evolution, where the general public expects architects to provide design services with an emphasis on architecture as a product of consumption. As a result, now more than ever before architects are required to generate original designs, but also to ensure that they can deliver these designs on time and within budget restrictions. This necessity to provide broader services will put additional pressure on architects during the stages of project execution, already often problematic due to the great deal of complexity and coordination involved in bringing a project to completion.
As global markets succeed and information becomes more easily available, domain standardization for design and construction methods is fast becoming a common language for remote interaction. The international use and commercialization of predominant brands for construction components and products, transforms them into preferred industry standards, becoming common knowledge for teams from many different locations. Without a doubt, technological convergence allows further connection and facilitates Workshare between diverse and/or dispersed project teams. However, as technologies change the factor of adaptability must be examined. An increasing exchange of global architectural services brings the added difficulty of dealing with the particular requirements of each architectural environment: local codes and regulations, industry methods and standards, and cultural principles. Nevertheless, the proliferation of young architects, with a global architectural education and, consequently, with a broader perception of multicultural platforms of practice addresses these difficulties.
The phenomenon of outsourcing has had a huge impact on working processes in many industries (software, finance, legal, etc) and has drastically altered traditional standards for business operations and profitability. The internet provides an exceptional level of interconnectivity that supports not only the faster completion of traditional work processes and tasks, but also changes the essence and meaning of how workers conceive of those processes and tasks.
An increasing number of developing economies located overseas in different points of the globe, are experiencing economic booms based on providing outsourcing support to economically developed regions. The overall fragmentation of the AEC industry and the particularities of knowledge iteration in the implementation of building design have impeded architectural outsourcing adoption within the field of architecture until now. Nonetheless, the field of architecture, although slow to adopt this work practice, is not immune to this global trend which has generated certain geographical expertise concentrations for providing architectural outsourcing in countries such as India, Philippines, and China. Architectural outsourcing providers can be characterized by their geographical dispersion.
Architectural outsourcing service providers include both local providers (on-shore architectural outsourcing) and foreign providers (off-shore Architectural outsourcing), demands an evaluation of the different value offers and motivations implied by geographic Location. Service demanders, on the other hand, are more often differentiated by their skill level and response capabilities and less about the influence that their geographical location has on their Practice. At first, large manufacturing companies delegated non-qualified repetitive labor to strategic locations, such as Mexico, China, or Turkey, where production costs were noticeably cheaper. This represents an initial level of outsourcing. Second, manufacturing companies started to provide not only labor but finalized products (labor outsourcing). After a period of time, supplying companies learned the required processes to provide completed products and therefore to supply and enhance value in the market (product fabrication outsourcing).
Next a third level of outsourcing appeared when supplying companies learned the overall business model required to externalize and later integrate processes or functions required for the business model (business Process outsourcing, BPO). These functions still had relative influence in the overall business performance (call centers, accounting, administration, etc). A fourth level in this escalation appeared when the processes or services accomplished by outsourcing entities required higher knowledge and education to accomplish them, and therefore became increasingly important for the business model (knowledge process outsourcing, KPO ). At last, the fifth level for outsourcing occurred when remote entities were intrinsically embedded into the demanding company business model, such that seamless Workshare occurs between the two parties
In the Indian context Architectural Outsourcing are stepping up on infrastructure and technology and ramping up skilled manpower to cope with the influx. Architectural designing outsourcing to India is growing at an unprecedented pace and is showing no signs of slowing down. With the availability of talented manpower, lower costs and best of the best infrastructure architectural outsourcing to India has gathered commendable speed. With the increase in offshore demands and wielding the latest software and technical skills, architectural designing outsourcing in India serves clients from UK, the US and the Middle East. A number of small-medium firms with 50+ employees have mushroomed across the country offering quality architectural designing outsourcing serves at a fraction of the cost. The growth in the industry has been so spectacular that the rupee crunch and fall in the number of skilled resources has not drastically affected most firms.
Industry estimates predict architectural outsourcing will form the second largest segment in the service industry of India. Offshore architectural outsourcing poses enough benefits to the overseas markets, which is the reason behind a marked growth in the demand for these services in leading KPO industries such as in India. Accounting to $16.7 billion in revenue, India is expected to contribute to two-third of the global KPO by 2011. Several architectural design outsourcing companies in India have bagged small scale design projects abroad, mainly from US, UK and the Middle East. A decrease in the number of skilled professional abroad along with the quality of services and the lower costs offered by offshore architectural design companies are driving this demand home. There is a disparity of one tenth of the cost between designing process in the US and in India.
Growth and maturity of the BPO industry, IT outsourcing has led to the significant rise of the KPO industry, especially Architectural Outsourcing. The success and substantial results achieved by many organizations in outsourcing operational tasks have led Global Businesses to contemplate outsource high end knowledge and skill intensive tasks.
