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I disagree with you. Perhaps, if done right it can be cost effective. But I have never seen outsourcing any technology department here without sacrificing quality. And, boy, have I seen a lot.
I've done several implementations over the past 6 years. For investment banker firms and pharmaceutical companies. With the exception of 2 minor hiccups that, my clients have been happy with the outcome.
It depends on the size of the project, but usually having an 8 person project management team, 4 of them working with Business Analysts in the US, and the other 4 sent to India managing the technology teams over there has worked for me. Having managers on both sides is key.
This project I just rolled off ofin May, I had put into place an offshore operations team that was saving the client $2.11mm/month. Because we have managers on both sides, it's fairly seamless to them.
I've done several implementations over the past 6 years. For investment banker firms and pharmaceutical companies. With the exception of 2 minor hiccups that, my clients have been happy with the outcome.
It depends on the size of the project, but usually having an 8 person project management team, 4 of them working with Business Analysts in the US, and the other 4 sent to India managing the technology teams over there has worked for me. Having managers on both sides is key.
This project I just rolled off ofin May, I had put into place an offshore operations team that was saving the client $2.11mm/month. Because we have managers on both sides, it's fairly seamless to them.
Again, I never denied cost savings. From my experience, since service management companies have one face to the customer, the customer is often shielded and unaware of the inner workings of the environment after the migration. As long as there are no major outages or process delays, they are happy. However, any environment can degrade without notice to management for years. I know of three companies already (which I assisted in migrated development or operation management overseas), that are beginning to rethink this decision. Both of them were happy until the environment degraded into such a mess, that outages became more and more frequent.
I currently work for a very large service provider that provides IT services to companies. Our business model often off-shores level one and two support, while keeping level three support local. I can tell you, that though the customer is extremely happy with our service, more work is now expected from level three support to extinguish fires before they reach the ears of the customer. Having worked for large service providers like IBM, HP, EMC, EDS and others in the past, there are always security, support and communication issues when working with teams overseas.
Last edited by Thomas_Thumb; 06-26-2010 at 01:31 AM..
Having worked for large service providers like IBM, HP, EMC, EDS and others in the past, there are always security, support and communication issues when working with teams overseas.
There are always security and communication implications when performing large-scale migrations to operations overseas. In general, there are advantages and disadvantages with providing service abroad (I never denied that there are advantages). But improving quality of service is generally not one of them. Almost always, local teams provide better support, but can be at a much greater cost to the customer.
I have worked directly for your clients IBM, HP and EMC over the last decade.
Last edited by Thomas_Thumb; 06-27-2010 at 12:40 AM..
There are always security and communication implications when performing large-scale migrations to operations overseas. In general, there are advantages and disadvantages with providing service abroad (I never denied that there are advantages). But improving quality of service is generally not one of them. Almost always, local teams provide better support, but can be at a much greater cost to the customer.
I have worked directly for your clients IBM, HP and EMC over the last decade.
I'll admit that I don't have much experience in providing offshore support. Majority of the work I deal with is software engineering. I'm typically not involved in the projects once they go live, so I don't know how the support side is handled. I'd imagine it would be similar to how you've mentioned and probably with a lag in quality as you suggest.
I personally think that when developing software, I don't see much of a difference in quality. Everything goes through local QA and UAT, so by the time it's pushed out, it's passed local scrutiny.
I'll admit that I don't have much experience in providing offshore support. Majority of the work I deal with is software engineering. I'm typically not involved in the projects once they go live, so I don't know how the support side is handled. I'd imagine it would be similar to how you've mentioned and probably with a lag in quality as you suggest.
I personally think that when developing software, I don't see much of a difference in quality. Everything goes through local QA and UAT, so by the time it's pushed out, it's passed local scrutiny.
Ok, I think we were comparing apples with oranges. In the past, I have worked both in software development and operations support. I agree with you that moving software development is probably easier than moving IT operations support. They are two entirely different beasts.
I'm working on a different approach for the operations side of things. We want to move the entire cloud offshore. The physical hardware offshore. And have level 1 helpdesk be onsite, while Level 2 and 3 are mostly offshore.
The idea is that the cloud is provided by offshore service providers and companies pay based on usage of resources.
This eliminates the complex setups in server rooms here. It also cuts down cost since offshore they can dynamically bump up and down the number of required engineers transparently.
I have financial backing for going forward with this, I am scouting talent.
Well, I mostly work with very large companies, and so cloud computing solutions are not a good fit, lacking the security, flexibility, control and scalability to meet their needs.
In the past, I have been sent overseas (India, Mexico and Brazil), trying to bridge process gaps and support. Though I understand that these countries will most certainly be big players in the cloud computing space, I've got to wonder about these early adopters and if they really know what they are getting themselves into . Getting your data locked in the clouds in the hands of these countries... Yikes!
Companies seem more than willing to outsource to India, not caring about quality.
As India companies have more financial problems the quality will decrease even on the best planned contracts. So, give it more time and you'll see more programming work back in the US.
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. Getting your data locked in the clouds in the hands of these countries... Yikes!
