Some firms move jobs 'onshore'

CORSICANA, TEXAS — Gary Richardson left this boomtown-gone-bust in 1996 for a computer job in Dallas, the big city 60 miles north.

"I didn't think I would ever come back," Richardson recalled recently, "because there were no jobs like mine here."

Not until this year, when Northrop Grumman Corp. opened an information technology center in town and began recruiting IT specialists and software engineers.

In a twist on offshoring that Northrop has dubbed onshoring, the global defense and technology corporation has been shipping computer work to small-town America, shunning India's Bangalore and Mumbai.

Century City-based Northrop picked Corsicana and six other small cities, including Lebanon, Va., and Helena, Mont., as locations for employees who develop software and troubleshoot technical problems for clients hundreds or thousands of miles away.

It costs Northrop about 40% less to have the work done in Corsicana than in Los Angeles -- savings similar to what would be achieved by sending jobs overseas.

"We're getting very high quality and a dedicated workforce," said Thomas Shelman, president of Northrop's Information Technology Defense Group and creator of the company's onshoring program.

Onshoring, in fact, is becoming trendy.

Some U.S. companies have recently pulled back from India to set up shop in rural areas where access to high-speed broadband connections isn't the problem it was just a few years ago, and where lower real-estate prices and wages are attractive.

Xpanxion, an Atlanta-based software developer, relocated its test operations to Kearney, Neb., from Pune, India, because the time difference was hampering communications.

Computer maker Dell Inc., once at the forefront of outsourcing to foreign countries, opened a technical support center in Twin Falls, Idaho, after customers complained about overseas workers' English-language skills.

Accenture, the world's largest consulting firm, is building a document-processing center on an Umatilla Indian reservation in Oregon.

"We're responding to the tremendous demand among Accenture clients for outsourcing services performed by professionals within the U.S.," Randy Willis, a senior Accenture executive, said when the project was announced last fall.

A few companies based in India are turning outsourcing on its head too. Wipro Technologies, a software maker based in Bangalore, is establishing a design center in Atlanta that could employ about 500 computer programmers.