Devott, a services outsourcing consultancy based in Tianjin, recently published its research report on China’s Software & Information Service Outsourcing Industry.

The list of the top 10 outsourcing parks has no great revelations, other than it is the first report I am aware of that tries at the economic development zone level to determine the strongest players in the Chinese services outsourcing field.

Sometimes, the absence of a thing can be as strong a determinant as the presence of another. In this case, the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) was nowhere to be found on the list (yeah, yeah, so it’s where I make my home). Sure, there was the Suzhou New District (SND) which, to my surprise and with no intended slight to my friends in SND, was a bit of a surprise, especially since I think some parks in the Nanjing area are far ahead of SND in pulling out all stops to become services outsourcing platforms.

So I sent a gentle email to Devott asking why the exclusion of SIP. Their kind response was that SIP hadn’t returned the survey Devott had mailed out to SIP administrators. SO GET ON THE TRAIN AND CHECK OUT THE PLACE! was my unspoken response. You’re already in China, a stone’s throw away from most of these places. For crying out loud, when are businesses going to remember you have to eyeball everything in China – especially if any level of government is involved in the results. Put feet on the ground. Use a little elbow grease, as my mama used to say. Unfortunately, the profiles of each of the Top 10 in the list also read like government brochures.

Let’s hope the next consultancy to put out such a list gives its staff a bit of budget to work with when they put together a survey like this one.

It’ll pay off: at least, they won’t have a cranky blogger crabbing at them.