Rural outsourcing on the rise in the US

For years, US companies have been shipping development work and other IT tasks offshore in pursuit of low labor costs. Now a growing number of organizations are taking advantage of lower costs closer to home, by hiring outsourcing providers with operations in rural areas of the US. Hard numbers on the growth of rural outsourcing are difficult to come by because none of the leading IT and sourcing research firms breaks out data specifically on rural outsourcing. But Mary Lacity, professor of information systems at the University of Missouri's College of Business, who has been conducting extensive research on the market, says that in the past year or two there has been huge demand for the services.