There is an alternative to offshore software development that provides a lower total cost than traditional development in urban centers but without the communication, logistical, and quality problems of offshore. The alternative is Rural Shoring.

The cost savings is achieved by producing software in development centers outside urban areas utilizing less experienced, part-time talent. The talent could be students from local universities or community colleges, or individuals with potential as software developers who didn’t have the opportunity to go to college at all.

It’s a win-win for the workers, the software organization, and the customers purchasing the software. The employees get extremely valuable software engineering experience (a growing industry with huge demand), and get paid more than they could at a typical part-time job (while improving their future earning potential dramatically). The obvious benefit for the software organization is the cost savings, but the benefits don’t stop there.

I am a consultant, so my ideas about Rural Shoring come from that perspective. A consulting company, in particular, can benefit from Rural Shoring. Imagine an organization staffed with a mix of great, young talent and senior industry experts, development teams with years of experience working together, dozens of successful projects under their belt, and mature, repeatable development processes that allow them to consistently deliver software projects with top quality and a cost much lower than typical urban development centers. Sounds too good to be true? Indeed. A quality organization of talented individuals in the software industry is limited only by its sales and staffing capabilities in today’s IT market… Rural Shoring makes a great sales pitch.

As far as the staffing concerns… when your part-time developers graduate from college, you have an automatic pool of young, entry-level talent with experience in your processes, from which you can hand-select the most talented individuals. You know which ones will be the experts of tomorrow because you have had months to evaluate their aptitude and enthusiasm. Rural Shoring makes top entry-level talent a renewable resource for your organization.

I’ll be posting a lot about Rural Shoring because I think it’s a market with HUGE potential, but there are a lot of details to flush out… Stay tuned!