Industry Watch: Outsourcing by another name
March 15, 2010 —
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“In 2010, why are you still outsourcing?”
This is a question Raja Nagarajan says he asks companies looking for those advantages all the time.
“By definition, outsourcing means a loss of control.”
Nagarajan is senior vice president for global operations of software product labs at Ness Technologies, a company that creates a “global development environment” for its partners that require 24x7 work and a less-expensive labor force. It’s outsourcing under a different name, and Nagarajan explained what makes it different.
Traditional outsourcing meant that a company would send its software requirements overseas, try to overcome language and time-zone barriers, and then, when the project was completed, try to integrate it into a larger effort and hope everything worked. Or a company would send a discrete project abroad that did not need to integrate with anything larger, because the road to success was fraught with peril.
Nagarajan said that with a global development model, his company first tries to understand what he called “The Three C’s”: the context of the parent company and product, the culture of the company Ness is associating with, and the constraints under which that business is running.
“How do you make sure the product company and [the outsourced development lab] are in sync? How quickly can you get skilled resources to understand what the product is? You have to do constant evaluation,” he said. Further, you must make sure the knowledge in the parent company is transferred to the partner and that the knowledge is retained there. “I call it marination and retention,” Nagarajan quipped.
The time-zone issues will never go away, he acknowledged, but he did say that it doesn’t matter where standup meetings and continuous integration are done. With a project manager coordinating activities between the parent company and the remote location, communication issues are overcome.
New technology enablers, such as cloud computing, and process enablers, such as agile development and software-as-a-service guidelines, are turning outsourcing into opportunities for the kind of deep development partnerships that could not have existed before, Nagarajan said.
Related Search Term(s): outsourcing
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