Report

Towards Sustainable Outsourcing: A responsible competitiveness agenda for IT-enabled services

By Oshani Perera, Paul Begley, Alex MacGillivray, Rafiq Dossani, Nandan Nilekani on March 13, 2009

IISD's primer on Responsible Competitiveness in the Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) explores an ambitious agenda for countries, cities and firms to create an outsourcing model that is genuinely sustainable. In the past decade, sustainable development proponents and the ITES industry have missed two clear opportunities to engage in developing solutions for sustainable development.

They now have a third chance-ITES 3.0, which recognizes that investment in ITES alone, will not automatically increase resource gains and productivity. Rather, ITES needs to be given its due place as a new industry, while investment promotion agencies need to broker agreements that will increase employment, innovation and entrepreneurship in their own countries.

The current global economic downturn will only increase the momentum for ITES 3.0 as governments create even more streamlined value chains, a more equitable distribution of incomes and design stimulus packages to support new 'green' jobs and technologies.

Report details

Publisher
IISD
Copyright
IISD, 2009