Experiences & best practices on nearshoring, offshoring & global IT staffing

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.  

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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’.

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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.

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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 →