I was chatting yesterday with a fellow attendee at the salesforce.com meeting on its new AppExchange (very interesting, but more on that at a later date). Tom's business card states "offices in the United States and India", and in the ensuing conversation I mentioned some research I'd done a few years back on outsourcing to rural areas within the U.S. such as Roanoke, Virginia. He asked, "where else?", so today's earlier post is partially an update to the previous topic, and partially an answer to his question.

I say it's a partial answer because it gives some pointers of where to start looking. The businesses mentioned in that post are huge, and can afford to set up very large branch offices from scratch. For a smaller business you're more likely to hire in single digits, so I'd suggest guru.com (which I've used) or elance. com as a way of hiring consultants with the idea of testing the waters for a more permanent arrangement. A more time-consuming approach is to work with the local economic development authorities - they often have pilot programs that work well for 10's of hires, perhaps locating employees in a telework center to provide some level of supervision and socialization for workers.

Businesses in Virginia should also check out NVTC - the Northern Virginia Technology Council, which tracks state technology policy among other activities.

5:49:07 PM