As I was browsing through the forums at Arstechnica, I came across a post titled "Alternatives to outsourcing?".

Being an IT consultant, this immediately caught my attention.

I read in Time, a while back, that a few companies were experimenting with insourcing, or the idea of setting up shop in areas of the US where the cost of living is low.

As the Net has spread and the amount of bandwidth has increased, to me, physical location is becoming less and less important as communication via the Net has become more accessible.  From video chat to VoIP, the reality of a truly distributed team unit is getting ever closer to reality.  Hopefully, WiMax will get us over that next hurdle of "the last mile" and truly network the entire nation.

What kind of strikes me as odd is that, even though most (probably every) software developer or IT consultant has a broadband connection, why I still have to show up at the office every day.  To be honest, for the 9 months that I've worked here, a total of 4 of those months were spent on "The Bench" (some refer to it as "The Beach").  I know some people that can't work at home due to the inability to focus or other distractions like spouses or children, but that's not the case with me and I'd happily and productively (somehow this doesn't seem like proper grammar) work from home.  It wouldn't be so bad if I could show up in jeans and a dress shirt, which I did for the first few months, but now we have this silly business casual dress code (yes, I'm being picky), and I have to wear khakis.  Tucked.  Blah!

Okay, back on topic .  To be honest, I could do my job just as well from my fictional house in rural Georgia or South Dakota, provided I have a broadband connection.  And I'd rather be doing that than living in Jersey.  Traffic congestion is horrible and I think it lessens my lifespan by 20 minutes each day (the amount of extra time it takes me to get to work due to traffic).  For the price of a small townhouse in Jersey, I could build a huge, 4 bedroom castle in Kansas.  In fact, Kansas offers free residential land to encourage people to move out there.  Not only that, they offer free commercial land and lots of monetary incentives to set up shop out there.

So the question stands, what's wrong with insourcing and why don't we see more of it?  Certainly, while it's not as cheap as outsourcing/offshoring, I think it's a better investment in the long run considering the state of our economy and the good press it can bring a company willing to invest in the American people.