ATT CEO talks of ease of outsourcing

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson: "We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he said, referring to the Indian city where many international companies have "outsourced" technical and customer support workers. [IPBiz notes the typical first step is to talk about all the IT jobs in a particular state, to encourage movement on S.1145 on patent reform. Stephenson's play is step number 2.]

And, yes, IBM had a patent application on that, too. Appl.11/324958; US2007/0162321 — Outsourcing of Services, with first
claim:

A computer program product for

identifying at least a portion of a human-resource within an organization for outsourcing,

the computer program product comprising:

a storage medium readable by a processing circuit and storing instructions for execution by the processing circuit for performing a method comprising: receiving a list of a plurality of tasks being performed by a plurality of individual human resources within a given portion of an organization; grouping each of the tasks into a plurality of functional groups so that each of the functional groups represent an end result for the plurality of tasks associated therewith; receiving an amount of the individual human resources spent on each of the tasks within the functional groups; aggregating the amount of the individual human resource spent on each of the tasks to provide a total aggregate time for each of the tasks within the functional groups across the organization; and

identifying tasks based upon the total aggregate time for outsourcing to a lower cost supplier.

See previous IPBiz posts:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/10/ibm-withdraws-business-method-patent-on.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/02/harris-patent-cost-reduction-via.html