In the early 1990’s there was a huge increase in jobs that seemed to be sent offshore. In 2004 a special report was commissioned by the U.S. government titled, The Changing Nature of Corporate Global Restructuring: The Impact of Production Shift on Jobs in the US, China, and Around the Globe. The study showed that U.S. corporations doubled the amount of American jobs that were sent overseas. The study said that between 2001 and 2004 over 850,000 professional service and information sector jobs were moved offshore.  It should be noted that the study has a political bias and claims that the reason for these job movements was due to “bad trade policies pursued by the Bush administration.”

Missouri had their state primary yesterday.  Many states have already had their primaries, but for some reason Missouri waits until almost the last minute.  There are only 90 days left until the general election, so there isn't much time for candidates to campaign against their opponents if they haven't started yet.  It may not seem obvious, but when you think about it, there is a very real connection between elections and the IT business.

Some time ago, in an article entitled Basic Training - The Weapons, I wrote about the tools necessary to do data integration.  I mentioned some of the tools necessary to perform data integration tasks, such as PL/SQL, applications and Informatica. As a production support analyst I use many of these same tools. However, one of the most important tools that we use in production support is documentation.

When I was researching my last article about the drop in enrollments for Computer Science in the mid-2000's, I found some articles that tried to explain why.  Many of the articles I read indicated that students were worried that if they completed a degree in Computer Science in the 2000's, that they would end up losing their job due to counterparts offshore.

I have been blessed to be a data integration professional for over 13 years now.  I always wanted to be involved in computers, but took some turns off that path along the way.  Luckily I now have had the privilege of being in the Information Management business for quite a long time.

Today a colleague and I were having a cubicle discussion around some issues we were working on.  As I've mentioned before, when I'm not working on production batch process issues and fixes, I work on data quality fixes.  At one point in the conversation my colleague said, "We're just passing the frog around."  When I looked at him with a perplexed expression on my face, he clarified, "I had a data structures professor that said it is like passing a frog around when bad data goes from one system to another to another.  The frog keeps hopping along and every where it lands, the data is bad."  When you think about data quality issues, "Passing the frog around" is a pretty accurate way to describe the situation.