Rural Sourcing, Inc.: Bringing High Tech Jobs to Rural America
An Economic Development America interview with Dr. Kathy White

by Louise Anderson, International Economic Development Council

Dr. Kathy Brittain White

Dr. Kathy Brittain White is the founder and president of Rural Sourcing, Inc. (RSI), a Jonesboro, Arkansas-based company that is developing information technology employment in rural areas in the U.S. using the global outsourcing model.

RSI offers technology workers at a competitive cost. A recent survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting in New York confirms the low cost of doing business in Little Rock, Arkansas – more than 30 percent below a metropolitan area such as San Francisco. Operating expenses can be even further reduced when employees are located in rural areas throughout the United States. As an additional benefit, keeping business on-shore ensures familiar and more reliable legal and social environments.

RSI currently has its main office in Jonesboro, home of Arkansas State University (White’s alma mater), and is preparing to open its second regional center in the eastern North Carolina town of Greenville. It also has three satellite offices – all with billable employees – in two other locations in Arkansas, plus one in New Mexico. Now in its first full year, RSI aims to grow to 50 employees by the end of 2005.

White was executive vice president and chief information officer at Cardinal Health, Inc., before starting RSI in 2003. Previously, she held executive positions with two other corporations and also was an associate professor of information technology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her involvement with Arkansas State University as an alumna played a role in RSI’s genesis.

In this interview with Economic Development America, White talks about RSI’s origins and business model.

You were at Cardinal Health before you started Rural Sourcing. How did the idea germinate?

I was having trouble retaining people in the 1995 period because people were jumping ship. That’s when we didn’t have enough IT workers for the jobs; we were ramping up for Y2K.

So we started going back [to Arkansas State] with a virtual internship program. Interns worked 12 hours a week in a facility on campus…the first outsourcing. Then, when we tried to recruit them to Cardinal Health’s locations, most of them would not move. As offshoring became a huge initiative, it was evident that we did not need to move American workers to the work; instead, we could move the work to them. That’s really the premise of the idea.

The virtual internship program expanded to three locations in two states and I saw firsthand the caliber of work that was done. I learned a lot from these pilot programs and believed we could replicate the model in an expanded way.

How did you finally make the leap from Cardinal to starting Rural Sourcing?

Before I left Cardinal, I set up a foundation for technology in Arkansas and committed $2 million to economic development and technology outreach. I was searching for something that I could do to integrate my passion and technology skills. Rural Sourcing is it.

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