Canadian IT Execs Say U.S. Peers Are Overpaid.

UNITED States; CANADA

This article focuses on the wages of U.S. IT executives in comparison with Canadian IT executives. According to Allen Borak, vice president of information systems at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. in Calgary, Alberta, U.S. IT executives are grossly overpaid. Borak, who's completing an IT compensation study comparing wage rates, said IT manager salaries in the U.S. are as much as 25% higher than those for similar positions in Canada after being adjusted for the currency exchange rate. Some Canadian chief information officers (CIOs) suggest that a key reason U.S. workers are facing a larger offshore threat than their northern counterparts is because of their high pay. They see evidence of such high wages when U.S. providers bid on consulting services with hourly rates of $200. But Canadian IT executives aren't ignoring the offshore option, which their U.S. peers use to reduce labor costs. because of its lower IT wages and an exchange rate that puts the Canadian dollar at about 25% below the U.S. dollar, Canada is an attractive nearshore outsourcing destination for U.S. companies. RIS Resource Information Systems Inc., an application development and maintenance outsourcer that sponsored a CIO conference here last week, is seeing steady growth in nearshore work from the U.S. even RIS is going offshore to lower costs, having opened a facility last year in Romania. Workers there are paid about half as much as their Canadian counterparts. INSET: One Canadian's View From Above.