OFFICETIGER Outsourcing company prowls for cheap help

The company profits by helping others send jobs to India.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
CHENNAI, India -- Task by task, function by function, the American office is being hollowed out and reconstituted in places like this, a makeshift facility on the sixth floor of an ancient shopping mall.
OfficeTiger Ltd., one of the most prominent and aggressive of a new breed of outsourcing companies, has hired 2,000 Indians, most of them young and all of them relentlessly gung-ho.
They work as typists, researchers, librarians, claims processors, proofreaders, accountants and graphic designers. Their clients are U.S. brokerage firms, investment banks, law firms and even copy shops.
The Indians take on jobs both big -- 100-page investment reports requiring weeks of work -- and small. Iayaraja Marimuthu, for instance, is designing a program for next month's wedding of Ann and John, a Texas couple proclaiming their joy in being "together for life." It will take him less than an hour.
Outsourcing, which started with U.S. companies laying off software programmers and call center workers and hiring cheaper employees overseas, is now stretching to encompass almost any kind of work that is done on a computer and is orderly and repetitive in structure. That's a vast category that stretches from copy editing to financial analysis to tax preparation.
Just as voice mail reduced the need for receptionists and word processors transformed the traditional role of secretaries, outsourcing is beginning to reshape the office, eliminating some jobs and redefining others. Its proponents say it will lift the burden of menial chores from millions of office workers, giving them more time to spend on challenging and creative enterprises.
"We're allowing employees to delve deeper, to learn more, to push the boundaries of what had been standard work," says OfficeTiger's American co-founder, Joe Sigelman.
Other point of view
That's one side of the argument. But for other employees, outsourcing means the permanent threat of dismissal in favor of someone who can do the same job for a tenth the salary.
It also means revamping the methods of entering certain professions, including law and finance. There's a time-honored tradition in those fields of making new associates do the drudgery. It teaches them the subject and winnows the number of aspirants to the truly dedicated. That won't happen if the drudgery is shipped elsewhere.
Some economists say outsourcing is already so pervasive that it helps explain why the U.S. economy is doing such a lousy job of creating jobs.
In an unguarded moment, Sigelman recently said he was doing his best to keep corporate hiring down in the United States. "We hope to be leading the move of white-collar jobs from the U.S.," he told the Economic Times, an Indian paper, in December.
While many Indian companies, as well as American multinationals, are setting themselves up as outsourcers, OfficeTiger is particularly striking because it's come so far so quickly on so little.
Founded four years ago by two New Yorkers in their early thirties who had no expertise in the Internet, bureaucracy in India or even starting a business, the company will have revenue of $40 million this year. Eight of the best-known financial firms in New York and London have signed on as clients.
Most started tentatively, with just a few employees doing data processing. But they rapidly scaled up, moving more jobs and more-complex jobs. Stock market analysts are among the latest to see their work realigned.
Among other things, associate analysts prepare information on possible corporate acquisition targets. They go to databases, pull documents and put numbers into templates that can compare the company with its competitors.
During the flush times at the end of the 1990s, when it seemed the dot-com boom would go on forever, any young person with an ounce of ambition wanted to start his own company.
The founders
Joe Sigelman and Randy Altschuler, best friends since their first day at Princeton University, had good jobs on Wall Street -- Sigelman with Goldman Sachs, Altschuler at Blackstone Group -- but dreamed of setting out on their own. The eureka moment came one evening when they were both waiting for documents to come back from the word-processing pool.
Junior investment bankers have to do this a lot, and it's one of the more frustrating parts of the job. They live by the presentations they make for their bosses and clients, and every word must be checked and double-checked. If too many documents are submitted at once, the wait can be interminable, like it was that evening.
Sigelman and Altschuler scraped the initial funding together. Then they got lucky: The stock bubble burst. Financial firms shrank, and then shrank some more.
OfficeTiger executive Lou Fox believes that just about every corporate job has elements that can be outsourced, even if part of it -- litigating in a courtroom, making a sales call -- must be done in person. Outsourcing is inevitable, he says. "There's going to be a big job shift. Geography doesn't make a difference anymore."
The last time OfficeTiger ran a help-wanted ad -- it intends to double in size to 4,000 people by the end of next year -- it got 1,500 applications for 15 jobs.
Could end for workers
It sounds ideal, this setup, the beginning of a long-term relationship. Yet perhaps part of the urgency among the OfficeTiger employees is that they know how suddenly this romance could end, how soon they could be like the American workers no one wants.
"OfficeTiger is not about India," Sigelman says. "It's about scouring the world to find the best cross section of value and talent."
The company is opening an office in Sri Lanka, its first in South Asia outside India.
There will be others. Sigelman is keeping a particular eye on China. After all, they're learning English there. "In five years," he says, "all this may change."