Final Project Individual Assignment - Virtual Outsourcing

Abstract

In this blog, I intend to introduce virtual outsourcing as a branch of group final project which focuses on virtual organizations. The paper starts by giving out definition and different types of virtual outsourcing as well as the shifting points and driving forces for the shift. Then, benefits and drawbacks will be introduced throughout a case study concerning virtual outsourcing in medical field. Finally, I will conclude some solutions according to the drawbacks.

Definition of virtual outsourcing

It's become very common to outsource in virtual basis nowadays. Virtual outsourcing includes different types of jobs cover many different areas nowadays. Simple producing jobs were the earliest outsourced work, whereas virtual outsourcing has reached knowledge-based positions in information technology and engineering in recent years. Virtual assistants, customer service representatives, copywriters, translators and medical transcriptionists are other types of outsourcing tasks that continue to be popular.
Europe, Japan and the United States are the biggest outsourcing countries. As for the highest number of virtual outsourcing jobs are asked, India and China are on the top of the list.
The development of Internet and telephone technology made the biggest contribution to the fast progress of outsourcing. Most companies and workers communicate and send documents back and forth via email and telephone. 

Main types of virtual outsourcing

Outsourcing virtual assistants

Virtual Assistants have gained world’s attention for more than a decade. They are highly qualified, experienced business owners who basically do the same work as a typical Secretary, Personal Assistant and Office Administrator combined. Many Virtual Assistants holds the diploma in business and office administration with work experience in an office setting. 
The type of services that a Virtual Assistant offers differs from occasion to occasion. Services include general administration services, database and web site development, graphic design, sales support, presentation preparation, bookkeeping, desktop publishing, computer training and so on. 

Outsourcing virtual experts

For most of the outsourcing activities, they involve shifting business activity to an external company or organization, basically focusing on back office functions such as IT, HR and Accounting. However, it is gaining more appeal in medical services such as outsourcing experts and professionals to somewhere lack of medical resources. Such kind of outsourcing mainly consists of remote surgery, remote diagnosis, tele-consultation and so on. Among these, remote surgery serves as the most epoch-making development for outsourcing experts in the field of medical service.
Remote surgery (also known as telerobotic surgery) is the ability for a doctor to perform surgery on a patient when they are not physically in the same location. It is a form of outsourcing medical experts. A robot surgical system generally consists of one or more arms (controlled by the surgeon), a master controller (console), and a sensory system giving feedback to the user.  Remote surgery is a sort of outsourcing combining robotics, advanced communication technology and management information systems.

Shifting process of virtual outsourcing

Actually, the word “outsourcing” is not new. The term dates back to the 1970s, when manufacturing companies are looking for efficiency and hiring outside firms to manage less essential processes. At that moment, outsourcing began to work. Today, many companies outsource more than 70% of the content of their finished products. Large companies commonly outsource half of their system operations. Some organizations outsource their whole back office operations. Companies may soon be more outsourced signifying a fundamental reorganization that will affect its stakeholders. By shifting to virtual outsourcing, consumers’ choices will go up, product costs will decrease and workers’ roles will transform into a more various ways.
Of course, not only for business, but also medical services consider outsourcing as an efficient way to distribute experts and professionals.

Driving forces for shifting from traditional business to virtual outsourcing

External Forces

The external forces are forces that generate this change in an organization due to the outside environment.
i. Obtaining resources: globalization pushes companies to try every effort to gain as much resources as possible.
ii. Market forces: market’s requirements for products and services change from time to time. Therefore, organizations must always seek adequate ways to meet those changing requirements.
iii. Decay and deterioration: an organization can be affected by the environmental when days are hard. So, it is an efficient method to outsource some of their activities in order to prevent them from deterioration. 
iv. Technological changes: an organization has to adopt continuously changing technology by seeking new activities to improve its productivity inside the market. 
v. Competence: organizations within the same industry turn to compete against each other. Making difference by shifting to new form of business counts in the sever competition.
vi. Globalization: globalization refers to the increasing unification of the world’s economic order through reduction of barriers to international trade as tariffs, export fees, and import quotas.

Internal Forces

The internal forces for the shifting are signals inside an organization indicating that they need change. Mainly, they are:
i. Growth: when an organization or a technology expands, it is necessary to change its structure as well as business forms. A lack of experts in some specific regions hindering general growth of the whole group is also a heavyweight driving force;
ii. Life-cycle: organizations follow a certain kind of life-cycle model. Most of them emerge, grow, transform, and adjourn. In this process, it’s vital to make change so as to prevent adjourning too fast; 
iii. Human capital: mixing successful employees guarantees a successful team.  Managers must control that their human capital present an adequate performance which is acceptable regarding organizational goals. If employees are not following the right direction, changes happen; 
iv. Economical restrictions: taking cost into consideration, all organizations want to obtain maximum benefits using the less possible amount of resources. If too many resources are being consumed, it is high time that a company takes actions to change;
v. Merging and acquisitions of organizations: merging or the acquisition of one organization leads to bigger organizations where their structure and members should be reorganized in order to develop biggest productivity in it;
vi. Crisis: if an organization is in a crisis due to a sudden drop of its efficiency, it can be regarded as a possible solution that the company deepens organizational transformation.

A case of outsourcing experts – Remote Surgery 

 

Remote surgery has been booming for decades and is now in routine use. The world’s first telerobotic remote surgery was a laparoscopic cholecystectomy performed on a patient in Strasbourg, France by a surgeon from New York City on September 7, 2001, which is called “Lindbergh operation”.  Before that, many surgeries could not be conducted due to the lack of experts in the particular time in a certain area.
Although the “Lindbergh operation” was successful, many questioned the feasibility of routine use of this technology. Questions were about the application of telerobotic remote surgery for advanced laparoscopic procedures, its use in rural and remote corners of the world where a dedicated ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) band (as used during the “Lindbergh operation”) is not available, and the ease by which the robotic arms can be assembled by those not expert in robotics present at the bedside of a remote patient. Apart from technology problems, another sever question was concerning cooperation between medical personnel from different regions. For most of the medical service personnel, every surgery could be the first time for them to cooperate with the surgeon. Being not used to other’s behaviour habit, language barrier, lack of adequate communication can be the stumbling block for a remote surgery to be successful.

Nevertheless, outsourcing experts in medical area still gain appeal in the global basis. Individual patients are not the only ones taking advantage of the overseas medical market. Some companies (like Blue Ridge Paper Products of North Carolina), faced with the hard choice between providing health coverage and staying solvent, have tried sending their employees overseas for medical treatment.  And companies are not the only ones engaging in this trend. For example, a West Virginia legislator has been developing a bill that “would encourage state employees to have nonemergency medical surgeries overseas.”  Concomitantly, companies in Florida, California and North Carolina have begun to specialize in selling medical insurance and services that rely on foreign hospitals.
There has been a great deal of controversy within the medical profession concerning the reliability, cost effectiveness and relevance of remote telerobotic remote surgery. To some medical experts, it represents nothing more than the “Emperor’s new clothes” syndrome taken to extreme lengths. Or more frankly speaking, the critics say that progress is made simply for the sake of making progress and that something new is automatically associated as being better.
Others argue that the usage of telerobotic remote surgery may still have some problems that need to be solved. Yet basically, this kind of outsourcing has a tremendous potential to radically improve the efficiency and productivity of the profession. Taking this into consideration, the following is a comparison of both benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing experts especially by use of telerobotic surgery.

Benefits 

1. The main benefit for outsourcing medical experts is high quality of medical care. Because it resolved inequity in the distribution of medical experts across the globe, more and more patient can receive higher quality healthcare with the help of surgeons’ miles away. The fact that surgeons can perform surgery from a distance also benefits the quality of medical advice for the patient as they are able to reduce costs, as well as enjoying a greater degree of flexibility in terms of areas.
2. Outsourcing surgery reduces the cost both in time and money. Surgical services in places like India and Thailand cost less than half in the United States. For example, heart bypass surgery, which can cost more than $130,000 in the United States, can be performed for $10,000 in India and $19,000 in Turkey.  Additionally, the fact that a surgeon will be able to manipulate the robot from a centralized distance means that the surgery can be performed in a less restrictive manner. This means that the patient can be treated and operated with a minimum of staff which in turn, reduces costs.
3. Outsourcing experts enhance employees’ knowledge by learning from others. Collaborative approaches to workforce management can uncover hidden skills, save time and expense in deploying staff, and engage employees by putting their skills to good use and increasing their opportunities to learn on the job. 
4. Robotic surgery will allow for a much greater degree of precision and accuracy to be achieved whenever certain types of surgical procedures are being used.

Drawbacks

1. Robotic technology is extremely expensive both in running expenses and training. It requires specialized personnel training surgeons to properly manipulate the machine and also needs specialists to repair. 
2. Mutual understanding may be less between members in both side of the hospitals, namely members in patient’s hospital supporting the surgery and members in surgeon’s hospital. They have multiple team members who are trying to manage the initial implementation activities and ongoing operations. The patients’ hospital has team members who are supporting the surgery and also new to a certain kind of operation, and sometimes bring a view of “this is what we did in my last operation” without fully understanding nuances of the specific agreement that has been negotiated. Also, cultural differences can influence business negotiations in significant and unexpected ways.  Therefore, the cooperation might not be as smooth as it usually was in a real operation room.
3. Currently, there still exist some technical issues to be conquered. The major limiting factor hindering the development of robotic surgery is the “latency” which is the time delay between the instructions issued by the surgeon and the movement of the robot. With the current level of technology, the surgeon must be in close proximity.

Resolutions

There exist tremendous benefits for the outsourcing of experts; however, its drawback cannot be neglected, too. The greater the proportion of experts a team had, the more likely it was disintegrate into non-productive conflict or statement.  Thus, organizations are supposed to follow the resolutions as below in order to minimize the drawbacks.
1. Creative negotiation is demanded. In a creative negotiation, the negotiators move from available alternatives to creating novel alternatives. They go beyond the fixation on immediate gains, and frame the negotiation in terms of joint gains.  Therefore, sufficient and in-depth negotiation beforehand appears to be indispensable.
2. Make opportunities to meet at least once a year for workers who are supposed to work together. It is said that energy, engagement and exploration are three aspects of communication that affect team performance. And the most valuable form of communication is face-to-face. E-mail and texting are the least valuable.  Thus, it is also vital for virtual assistants and experts to meet together improving relationship in order to gain high performance collaborations in the future distant cooperation.
3. Encouraging R&D in remote surgery system would be a root resolution to increase telerobotic remote surgery. It should focus on both enhancing accuracy and reducing cost.
4. Keeping lines of communication open with outsourced team will be critical in making a success of outsourcing. Especially during the initial phase of the relationship, hospitals and medical workers should keep in constant contact and be clear about how the outsourced activities is going to be managed on a day-to-day basis.  

References

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