What can be outsourced to India?

Outsourcing is the current buzzword of the moment, with businesses falling over themselves to take advantage of offshoring and outsourcing their projects to save time, money and effort.

But what, exactly, can be outsourced? And which are best suited to India?

The answer is: pretty much anything. However, IT services in particular are the most popular and easily outsourced, along with business management, administration and infrastructure areas.

Nowadays, it's not just the products that get outsourced – with the idea of products such as computers, clothes, even cars and houses being built in other countries seen as old hat. Why outsource the production when you can outsource the whole service, with the whole distribution process completed in one place?

And IT services companies in particular, which have fuelled much of India's economic boom over recent years, are continuing to exploit the benefits of the system – which is expanding at a rate of around 30 to 60 per cent annually. IT is being treated like manufacturing in the modern world, with various areas being "assembled" in different locations before being put together in the final "product" at the end.

But while IT services now account for eight per cent of Indian GDP, there are many other areas coming up fast in its slipstream.

Media and entertainment is one service that can effectively utilise this system: imagine an advertising service whereby the management issues a brief in one country, it is written by a copywriter in another, graphics and computer work is installed in a third and the whole package is delivered to the client in a fourth.

However, while there is the danger of a shortage in qualified labour and a problem of retention for many enterprises – especially with the well-known call centre projects, which often have a turnover rate of more than 100 per cent – there is still the opportunity to not only make more profit, but to advance your business.

"Customers are no longer coming to us to cut costs - that's a given. They are saying, 'What can you do for us that will transform our business?'" one senior executive told the Guardian.

And in terms of IT and many other businesses, the answer is: quite a lot. Expanding the virtualisation of services means all kinds of industries can take advantage of outsourcing, from medical transcriptions to maintenance, facilities management and even psychiatric evaluations.

Accounting, computer programming, venture capital, human resources and advertising are among the most popular, alongside all the aspects of IT and telecommunications, meaning the interested business has little restrictions in utilising outsourcing in its future plans