Kent was sitting in a conference room with his Big Four Consulting firm team. It was the largest conference room the bank had in this building, and was almost too small. His assistant, Margret, was the only other bank employee in the room. All of the rest came with the consulting firm. Because Kent knew nothing about IT, he had little ability to defend himself from the team surge that happened three days into the project. Other than the team leader, they were all fresh college graduates, who the team leader claimed were all required. All Kent knew was that he was paying $120 per hour for each of them, and there were only seven slides in the PowerPoint presentation, but they all billed him for forty hours per week. A quick math calculation informed Kent that about half of the consulting budget he had available had gone out the door last week.

All of the girls working on the project wore short skirts with stockings and heels. They all wore some kind of top that looked very business and professional when you looked at them standing, but when sitting down they could turn/twist/bend to show all they had to offer. There was a lot of turning and twisting keeping the conversation going during the entire seven slides of the presentation. They managed to consume exactly forty minutes before opening it up for questions.

Kent had asked them to review his predecessor’s plan and see if the final round of data center consolidation was well mapped out. He expected a yes or no answer. If no, he expected to get a few extra pages added to the plan to round it out. What he got was neither of those.

Big Four’s entire presentation had been a bunch of quotes from the Langston Group about the cost savings of offshoring all IT operations. There had been spreadsheets computed with some of Kent’s own numbers showing the dramatic year-over-year cost savings once all of the data centers had been moved to India. The grand finale of this presentation included a spreadsheet showing how the entire cost of the move would be recovered by the sale of the existing data center locations and all of the equipment inside of them.

Kent sat shell-shocked for a while. He didn’t know anything about IT, but he knew how to read spreadsheets, and the spreadsheet they presented showed him an IT operating budget which was less than one third of his current budget. It wasn’t until the team leader offered to give this same presentation to the board with Kent and let him take credit for it that the gleam appeared in his eye. He had just bought the white elephant, and everyone in the room could see it.

Even the tiniest bit of research would have told Kent this wasn’t a consultant’s analysis, but a sales pitch. Kent’s assistant sat there shell-shocked after they all walked out of the room. She thought they should all have been summarily fired halfway through the presentation. The fact they were allowed to complete the entire presentation, and bill for it, left her feeling numb.

Margret actually had a degree in IT. The only reason she was allowed to keep her job when Kent came in was that she had also minored in business. Since he had started at the bank, Kent had been after her to go back to school and complete her MBA so she could move up in the company. He had no clue that she didn’t want to climb any higher. Had the market been a little better for consultants, she would have already been an independent consultant. A lot of companies were consolidating data centers now, and the experience she had from the prior consolidation was a license to print money when the next big project came up.

What Kent didn’t know: the board was too lazy to investigate. Big Four Consulting had an offshore division and Kent was being told to have it as the bank’s new data centers. A great big data center had been built and a lot of communication hardware had been installed and was just waiting for a client to install computers. Another company the Big Four owned half of was the Indian version of the Iron Mountain backup storage company. It was all a neat little package.

Anyone with a degree in IT and having more than a handful of years in the field knew that Langston Group was more a marketing company than an independent analyst. They were paid to promote a new trend every year or so. Each new trend had some big marketing war chest behind it and just happened to be the very thing the Big Four Consulting companies were experts in now.

Offshoring was currently promoted as a Utopia for slashing labor costs. Management viewed all workers as Grade 8 bolts. If you didn’t have an MBA, you were a Grade 8 bolt. You could be replaced by a Grade 8 bolt from a cheaper supplier with absolutely no negative effect on business. Thousands of workers with actual skill had been replaced by recent grads working offshore for less than welfare payments amount to in this country. Hundreds of companies were now engaged in creative accounting, hiding failed projects on their books so they could still tell investors just how much money offshoring was saving them. Hell, the bank had refused to extend lines of credit to three just last week. Yet, here they were, about to do the same thing themselves.

 
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You are reading a special promotional version of “Infinite Exposure” containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:


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