Making the Same Mistake Over and Over? How to Absorb Outsourcing Lessons into Process
May 21st, 2012
By Jagdish Dalal
George Santayana once wrote: “Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” I also like what Albert Einstein wrote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
So it is for many providers who do not have a structured process for learning from their past performance. Customers expect their providers to continuously improve their performance. In a competitive world of outsourcing, providers benefit by reducing service defects, thereby improving customer satisfaction and their bottom line. After all, failure to meet performance levels ends up costing them in their margin – directly or indirectly.
By Steve Mezak
Are you interested in exploring the agile methodology for developing software at your company, but you’re worried that it feels like writing a blank check to the developer? It’s a commonly held belief among companies looking for outsourced software development that agile could potentially cost more than traditional methodologies.
Capgemini to Establish Colombia Operations
May 17th, 2012Capgemini, one of the largest multinational IT companies in the world with presence in 40 countries and more than 50 years of experience, will open a subsidiary in Bogotá to offer its services to local clients and subsequently to clients based in other Latin American countries while using Colombia as its regional base of operations.
“Colombia is a key country in our regional expansion strategy; it’s a country experiencing strong growth that has a very capable workforce and a very competitive cost structure. For that reason we decided to open offices here,” said Peter Kroll, Senior Vice President of Capegemini North Latam.
Proexport Colombia facilitated Capgemini’s landing in Colombia; the company will generate 400 jobs in the next two years. “’We look for computer scientists that have graduated from Colombian universities and we train them to provide Capegemini services to national clients and to other clients in the region,” explained Kroll.
“More and …
By: Linda Tuck Chapman
Developing and implementing consistent, actionable performance metrics for your Application Development and Maintenance and Testing program is one of the best ways to ensure you get value for money. One of the most important aspects of developing effective metrics is to resist measuring everything that can be measured. Focus only on measuring what matters.
By Leonardo Mattiazzi
Agile has been largely regarded as an ideal fit for today’s business challenges (for a reference, check the Forrester Research Feb. 2012 report, “Determine The Business And IT Impact Of Agile Development”).
And, from our experience, the business benefit of using Agile is magnified when it is coupled with the application of Lean principles, such as establishing a continuous flow of constant throughput. This principle, known as heijunka in the Lean vernacular, when applied to software development means creating a continuous delivery model, with a fixed-size team that undertakes several different projects one after another (of course, using Agile methods in each one of them). By doing so, we are able to eliminate several different sources of waste, and significantly decrease the actual cost of these projects (in our estimates, by at least 25% in the long run), as well …
Panel: Getting Smart About Site Selection
May 15th, 2012Red tape, scalability, labor analysis, financial incentives and investment risk are among the burning issues for a Nexus panel joining together Ann Harts, Kevin Parikh and Fabrizio Opertti
By Dan Berthiaume
If you are a BPO professional and have had a sneaking suspicion in the past five to 10 years that contracts are getting more complex, it’s more than a hunch. For reasons including the growing importance of IT to the BPO equation, increased sophistication of BPO buyers, and the evolution of BPO beyond a means of lowering transactional labor costs, BPO contracts are growing more and more complicated.
Why HTML5 Projects Are a Great Fit for Latin America IT
May 11th, 2012By Steve Mezak
The emerging HTML5 standard will make it a lot easier to deliver more graphical and attractive Web pages to more and more devices (especially mobile devices). That makes it a big boon for Web developers, and also a great fit for Nearshore developers with an eye for good design and local tastes.
Economic Slowdown Won’t Stop IT Expansion in Brazil
May 3rd, 2012
By Luke Bujarski
Last week’s Bloomberg Latin America Investing conference in New York City was a sobering reminder of Brazil’s precarious economic balancing act hinging on foreign investment, consumption, government stimulus, and inflated commodity prices. Yet, despite mixed signals over the future macro outlook, Brazil’s IT services industry will continue to rage forward. Antonio Gil president of BRASSCOM shrugged off pragmatic panel concerns with confidence, reassuring the audience that IT will expand aggressively at ten percent annually, to reach $210 billion USD by 2020.
Managing Outsourcers: When SLAs Don’t Do the Job
May 1st, 2012By Robert L. Scheier
Service level agreements (SLAs) are the heart and soul of many outsourcing contracts. They define what the provider must deliver and their penalties for failure, in anything from application uptime to the time required to solve a customer’s problem on a help line.
But at least as currently defined, SLAs often fall short of detecting (and, more importantly, correcting) problems quickly. That was the message at the recent SIG Spring Summit from Senior Corporate Counsel Richard English of Ingram Micro and Shaalu Mehra of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, who helps the electronic distributor negotiate outsourcing deals.
