Free Infinite Exposure by Roland Hughes Page A

license savings to pay off the project. Margret was fairly certain it was going to be way more than the savings,
     but the girl had chutzpah for putting up a spreadsheet and leaving that off.
    The board made some appreciative sounds and a few members even nodded at each other. Of course they said they would have to
     discuss the project among themselves before making a decision, but everyone in the room knew the white elephant had been sold
     again. Business cards were handed out with promises they could call the cell phone any time with questions on the project.
     The team leader even offered to make reservations at a very posh restaurant where they could get a private room this evening
     to go over any details in a more relaxed surrounding.
    Oh, this girl can work it! thought Margret. I wonder if there will even be 14-year-old girls in the room to catch on video with the dirty old men? Nah. They won' t resort to that this time. Some of the fresh faces in this room might be on their knees later, but they all know the elephant
     has been sold, so they will just be doing that out of habit.
    Margret added an item to the To-Do list in her PDA: Update Resume.
    ***
    Kent walked back to his office using his strutting man-in-charge walk. He had power gripped each of the board member's hands
     at the end of the meeting and assured them he had every confidence of this project's success. He had an entire folder of links
     to articles from the weekly trade press expounding off-shoring as the answer to world hunger and the Utopia of cost cutting.
     Of course, Kent had to have his assistant Margret find those links and create that folder, but the board didn't need those
     details.
    Yes sir, Kent was already picking out his corner office in Mahogany Row. He was going to go from director to president, skipping
     all of those cumbersome VP roles in between. Kent was going to achieve this feat because Kent had a plan!
    Original ideas didn't happen much to Kent, at least not good ones. In truth, this wasn't an original idea, and it wasn't his,
     but he was going to claim it. Kent was going to be stuck in this IT role for approximately two years because the bank frowned
     upon people changing jobs more often than that. He could be “offered” a job through HR as part of a promotion, but he couldn't
     apply for one directly before then. You didn't get “offered” the kind of job Kent wanted unless you ended your tour on an
     up-swing, and he had an up-swing planned.
    Big Four Consulting assured him that they could migrate a data center every other month as long as there was a maintenance
     window in that month. They wouldn't risk moving a data center during the end of a quarter when many additional jobs would
     need to be run. Moving all four sets of data centers to the new off-shore set would take under 18 months. While the plan would
     address a massive cost issue, it still wouldn't address the monumental effort of integrating the various applications so management
     could have its “world view” of First Global Bank.
    Kent's big plan was to completely eliminate the on-shore programming staff. He had called a college friend at General Motors
     who told him how they had massively reduced their pension liability and direct cash outlay for programming by outsourcing
     all development to a consulting company that was using programmers in India and paying them $10/day. Of course the consulting
     company was charging $10/hour for those programmers and pocketing the difference, but that detail didn't come up. Another
     detail that didn't come up was the fact every project of any real size the off-shore workers did was a complete failure that
     had to be hidden in the books. No portion of it could be fixed or salvaged. No matter what country you went to for IT workers,
     skilled software developers didn't come cheap. This was an arrangement based on cheap, so they didn't get skill.
    All Kent had to do to justify getting rid of everyone here, and