KLG is on the forefront of identifying important trends related to geography and location and helping companies understand how these trends will affect them. Major demographic, economic, geopolitical, regulatory, and social trends are causing companies to fundamentally change how they think about geography. Ensuring a competitive cost structure, fostering creativity and innovation, and providing an adequate supply of workers with the necessary skills to run the business now and in the future increasingly means looking beyond the company’s current locations.

We help our clients pre-position themselves to not just respond to these changes, but to use them to their advantage. Our clients come to KLG for leading-edge solutions to complex challenges. They recognize that their success requires a forward-looking perspective that keeps them ahead of the curve. That’s why KLG places so much emphasis on maintaining a team of experts across a range of disciplines, allowing us to identify the trends that will impact our clients before they happen.

These are just a few of the major trends that companies should be planning for:

• Dramatic changes are occurring in the geographic concentration of talent and labor mobility patterns in the U.S. At the same time recent demographic trends are leading towards labor shortages – most acutely in a number of increasingly valuable skill segments. KLG is helping forward-looking companies use geography to ensure that they can make these trends work to their advantage. » Learn more about these trends (pdf file)
  
  
• Can domestic deployment rival the economic savings of “offshoring” to developing nations? KLG is confident that it often can. The trend towards relocating business functions offshore continues to gain momentum. For many years KLG has helped clients evaluate offshore alternatives. Often, such strategies have proven effective. However, just as often, KLG has helped clients avoid offshore moves that would not have been effective. In many instances, domestic opportunities have proven more fiscally and operationally attractive. » Learn more about these trends (pdf file)
  
  
• Rapid industry changes, accelerating product life-cycle rates, and evolving economic cycles – in concert with expanding global competition – are driving an increased need to constantly control costs to protect margins. Increasingly, industries concentrated in high-cost locations are seeking new locations that can provide significant savings. KLG regularly helps clients identify locations that provide new sources of high-quality talent at much lower costs. Critically, our understanding of macro- and micro-economics ensures that we identify locations where these savings are sustainable over the long-term and can have a lasting impact.
  
  
• As employers have increasingly turned to outsourcing to reduce costs, many have found that such arrangements have yielded lower savings than they require, lower performance then they expected, increased operational and security risks, and questions about the degree to which core functions should rest with outside service providers. KLG has repeatedly helped clients identify opportunities to create lower-cost captive operations that allow even greater savings than outsourcing while avoiding added risks, maintaining performance standards, and eliminating the downside of placing the control of critical processes outside of their own companies.
  
  
• U.S. companies continue to generate demand for scientific and technical workers that cannot be satisfied domestically … especially in a cost-effective manner. This has been a long running issue among information technology employers. Increasingly this is becoming a critical issue among employers requiring the highest-skill levels; professionals with advanced degrees in fields like mathematics, physics, engineering, and medicine. KLG is regularly engaged in helping employers with these requirements create strategies that open up large, untapped pools of such workers.
  
  
• At the cusp of the new century, many pundits and futurists were predicting that business would become increasingly “placeless” and that “where” would no longer be important. They heralded the dawn of the virtual, networked company, enabled by advancing technology; free of attachment to geography and facilities. This may happen someday, but not anytime soon. In fact, KLG expects just the opposite. Trends such as the accelerating pace of economic globalization and increased competitive pressures, greater reliance by companies on a diversity of specialized workers, and fundamental demographic shifts will make physical presences more important; increasing the need for companies to utilize geography to their advantage. Advances in communication technologies will not eliminate the need for geographic presences, instead they will serve as a facilitator to managing increasingly complex, geographically diverse organizations.

We welcome the opportunity to provide you with even more in-depth information on trends like these that will have major ramifications for how you do business in the future. While much of our research work is provided exclusively to our clients, we do occasionally distribute information to wider audiences. Please sign up to receive this information as it becomes available.

To see more of our research please visit our News & Research page.

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