Last year CMP Media’s Managing Offshore newsletter and offshoring consultancy NeoIT launced the “Offshore 100” awards program. They’ve just announced a repeat performance, and they’re taking applications here. (Better hurry! The deadline is October 17, 2005.) Results will come out in early January, but in the meantime, you can read through the list from 2005 here.
But now the list is going to have competition — from none other than the IAOP, the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, which announced this week it is compiling what it’s calling the “Global Outsourcing 100.” If you’re with a service provider, you can apply for that here.
Aside from a slight variation in names, the IAOP charges a $350 entry fee. Its results will come out in an April issue of Fortune magazine — as part of an advertising supplement. And it will offer “25 sub-lists” — little groupings of vendors by service provided, industry served and so on. In other words, no deserving (and paying) customer will go unnoticed.
I’ve worked on these sorts of lists before, and I’ll tell you, choosing the winners is a responsibility of dubious distinction. For one thing, it’s impossible to come up with criteria and an evaluation process that’s truly objective. (After all, the people doing this stuff don’t come from a vacuum; they have a history in the business, which means they also frequently have alliances, biases and perspectives that are bound to favor one contender over another.)
For another thing, at some point in these projects, judging fatigue kicks in. Say, you’ve chosen winner number 89. Ohmigawd! You’ve still got 11 more winners to go and you’ve already used up your entire supply of truly deserving companies. What to do, what to do? By then it’s too late to change the name of the contest to the “Offshore 89” or what have you. So you scrape off the bottom of the barrel and hope you’re not too far off the mark (for example, choosing a winner whose CEO is just about to be indicted on federal charges or whose largest — maybe only! — client is about to fire them in a wildly public fight in the pages of ComputerWorld).
Don’t worry. I’ll make a note to myself: Come next year, do a comparison of the two lists and see how they compare. Then I’ll share the results with you. Maybe I’ll call it the Sourcingmag.com 200. (“Ohmigawd! I really only have 132 companies! Is it too late to rename the contest?!”)
