To an ordinary person, outsourcing a business would seem like a waste of company resources and an additional complication for running a business. This makes sense because after all, why should a company send business abroad when it can be done right at home with a better guarantee for a much higher quality of work. But in the eyes of a businessman, the advantages of outsourcing serve as a modern day bonus for improving one’s business. Outsourcing offers a business the opportunity to transfer important but non-core sectors of business administration on BPO providers that specialize on the needs of the business. This will then provide a company enough time to focus their attention on key areas of the business that will bring more profit and revenue. Continue reading
What are the Americans doing that we Europeans are not doing?
I frequently speak to people in India that run BPO or software firms and I am always astonished by the numbers. People tell me that they started their software company 5 years back and employ 2000 people today. In Management Team, a famous Dutch magazine, I just read an article about Intelenet. This Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, started 10 years back with 40 employees and today has 42,000 employees. The biggest part of the work that is moved to India comes from the US. So they are doing something different from us. Continue reading
Quality Software with Agile Teams
Agile teams have shown to be a great way to deliver high quality software products. The agile values favore quality, and there are several agile practices that are applied by agile teams to develop high quality software.
What is Quality?
My definition of quality software is software that satifies the needs of the users, and delivers value to them. Quality is in the eye of the beholder, it is the user who decides if a software product or service has is quality, not the agile team. So teams can only deliver quality if they are driven by the needs of the users. In agile, this is supported by the agile values, and by intense collaboration of the product owner and the agile team. Continue reading
Nearshoring or offshoring: which works better?
A question that I often hear is whether offshoring is better than nearshoring or vice versa. First, let’s get straight on the difference. Nearshoring is when you move work to a country that is nearby your own country. Wikipedia speaks about a country bordering yours, but in Europe, we often mean Eastern Europe. Offshoring is moving work to another country in general. More specifically, most people mean moving work to a country in Asia, farther away. Some people talk about farshoring, rightshoring, bestshoring, nearsourcing, etc, but I will use the definitions above.
As my company has offices in both Eastern Europe and India, people always ask me what the differences are. Continue reading
The Key Steps to Process Outsourcing
When it comes to service or process outsourcing based on the requirements of your company, most expert business advisors would suggest that the best way of doing this is to set a bidding process for various BPO providers. Naturally, the request for proposal process for procurement outsourcing is an efficient approach when it comes to comparing the performance level of third party providers either via commercial agreements of contractual terms. But on the other hand, this particular approach is only viable for procurement outsourcing. When used on BPOs, there are possibilities that it might delay project delivery and or totally disconnect the solution from the initial strategic intention. Continue reading
Dutch government: offshoring is no ground for collective firing
The Dutch political party PvdA (Labor Party) will propose a bill to ban collective firing on the grounds of offshoring. The party declared so on its blog.
I think that this way of thinking does not fit with our day and age and that there are also inaccuracies that might be overlooked. We are living in a time of globalization, which means that work is done in places where it can be done best and/or cheapest. I think government should not interfere with this. Continue reading
The Rise of Financial Management as a Strategic Tool
Thanks in part to several key mega-trends in business thinking over the last 30+ years, senior business and technology executives face a fairly generic list of tasks today.
- They are working to align information technology (IT) with business goals, turn IT into a strategic asset, and use technology to gain competitive advantage.
- They want to measure the economic value of IT, empirically, to obtain accurate and detailed insight into the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT assets and services so they can measure the return on investment (ROI) of those IT investments. Continue reading
Do you have a global mindset?
I recently did a presentation on Talk About IT. One of the topics of my story was how mindset affects (working with) global teams. The highlights:
1. ‘I want to have people in my office’
This is a mindset that many people have and quite rational too. It’s easier to cooperate with people in the same office than with people outside. As John Blazey of TomTom put it during the event: ‘It is easy to work with someone on the same floor. But as soon as that colleague moves one floor down, things become different. It makes no difference whether they are one floor down or in another country’.
The #1 Way Internet Marketers Throw Away Their Time, Energy & Money
By now, just about every Internet marketer knows they ‘should’ be using a virtual assistant to free up their time for more important matters like strategizing, organizing campaigns, arranging JVs, creating new promotions, fine-tuning offers, etc. But, still, many marketers continue doing all the little things themselves. This is like bending over to pick up a penny while dollars drop out of their pockets — and they end up with a big rip in their pants!
Can you afford not to hire a virtual assistant? Let’s take a look… Continue reading
What does it take to successfully manage an offshore team?
Report: Talk About IT, November 15, 2011
Last Tuesday was the fifth time Talk About IT in Amsterdam. Talk About IT is a platform where interesting experienced speakers present their views about the latest topics in IT and where IT professionals come together to increase the size of their effective network. The theme of this Fifth edition was “how to make a success in international outsourcing?”.Attendees enjoyed the presentations by 4 speakers John Blazey, Chris Smit,Hugo Messer and Wilco Turnhout.
Good Governance as a Competitive Advantage
One would think the studies that demonstrate a strong correlation between good governance and the successful outcome of outsourcing engagements would be enough to convince everyone to pursue it, but that is not the case. Even the largest and most successful outsourcing vendors can be metaphorically linked to the cobbler, whose children have no shoes. Consumers and vendors of outsourcing services should seriously consider adding good governance to their repertoire as a form of competitive advantage. At the very least, they should start preparing for the day that it is considered a baseline requirement. Let me try to explain why good governance is so important.
Continue reading
Trends in international outsourcing
The past few years international outsourcing has come to play an increasingly large part within the IT industry. Mainly large companies like KPN and Sogeti regularly decide to relocate projects offshore, especially to India. For example, KPN announced two weeks ago that 450 Getronics jobs will be moved to India. Sogeti’s vision is that in 7 to 9 years one in three people from India offers their services to Dutch clients (right now this is barely 6 percent). In years to come international outsourcing will become more normal and will take place on a larger scale.
This development calls for adjustments in the behavior of Dutch IT employees and managers. Continue reading
Global Staffing: creating co-workers
Yesterday, I visited a seminar in Amsterdam about offshoring and afterwards had a long discussion with a project manager from Accenture. The main message of the day for me was that if you want to work with people on a distance successfully, you need to create co-workers.
Innovites is a small Dutch company with 3 people in the Netherlands and 5 in India. Albert Groothedde, CEO of Innovites shared some best practices on the seminar. His key advice:
An Android based tablet for $60…!!
An android based tablet computing device with 350 gm weight, 7” size touch screen, 800 x 480 pixel resolution, OS:Android 2.2, 256 RAM,2GB storage capacity, 366Mhz processor, 3 hour battery back-up, 2 USB ports, support Wi-Fi connectivity, supports more than 150000 apps, supports almost all image formats, Video formats, audio formats and the price….. $60..!!!!
The name of this Indian tablet is called “AAKASH” means “sky”. This amazingly ultra low price device that offers good quality and packs all common features found in Android tablets is a wonder for the tech world.
Global Software Development: Fixed price or not?
Internet and software projects are often executed on a fixed price & fixed date contract. The customer outsourcing the project feels ‘protected’ against delays and misunderstandings in delivery. But are you as a customer really protected or does it make the risk of project failure only bigger?
I spoke to a customer yesterday who had outsourced the development of his website to one of our competitors in the Netherlands with a branch in Asia. He had made a functional specification that covered all his needs and were clear to him. The supplier made an estimate and they agreed on a deadline. Few months ahead, the deadline wasn’t made and the result of the project was far from what he expected. Continue reading