A CIO’s Account of Nearshore, Ninjas and What Doesn’t Work Offshore
November 17th, 2011
Chris Snyder, CIO, Hulcher
Ever wonder what really distinguishes nearshore from offshore?
By Chris Snyder
I like to imagine an IT vendor selling the first screwdriver. “It can also replace the hammer, if you use the head of the screwdriver to hit the head of a nail. You also won’t need a knife for butter anymore because it will replace that as well. Crow bar… gone. Car keys… a thing of the past. A screwdriver will replace them all and you can finally standardize on one platform (the screwdriver) and reduce costs across the toolbox.”
The “right tool” approach to the organizational structure of an agile software development project mitigates cost by using arbitrage to achieve lower costs, while minimizing risks from misuse of resources – like using the screwdriver when you really need a hammer.
Sourcing in Brazil Means Competing with the Government
April 13th, 2011One CIO’s experience vying for talent and finding ‘much, much better’ results than India
By Dennis Barker
Imagine trying to staff up for an offshore project and every time you think you’ve got someone about to join the team, that person decides to take a job somewhere else.
That was the biggest and most annoying problem Chris Snyder ran into while working with a Nearshore IT provider. Snyder, director of IT services and CIO for Hulcher Services, getting the team from 80% to 100% staffing was the thing that kept him awake at night. “It might sound like a minor thing,” he says, “but it happened a number of times where we’d have a candidate we really liked tell us near the end of the hiring process, ‘Sorry, I’m taking a job with someone else.’ And that someone else was usually the government.”
Researchers at the University of Tennessee have studied a variety of outsourcing deals-from IT and back-office work to manufacturing and logistics-and identified the most common mistakes organizations make when partnering with an external provider.
The research reveals that outsourcing customers commit a variety of sins, and the most pervasive missteps can be traced to one simple fact: You get what you pay for, says UT lead researcher and supply chain consultant Kate Vitasek. Or more accurately, in the context of outsourcing, you get what you contract for.
“One of the common mistakes companies make is that their business model and the outsourcing contract are not aligned,” Vitasek says. “Economist Steven Levitt states it best-one of the most powerful laws of the universe is the law of unintended consequences. And a key reason for unintended consequences is that people do what they are paid to do.”
In other words, service providers will …
The Top Ten CIO-Driven Sourcing Trends for 2010
December 18th, 2009It was a long year of intense ups and downs in the IT outsourcing industry. Consolidation among vendors and interest in remote infrastructure management increased, while overall outsourcing demand and IT services pricing decreased.
The market for IT outsourcing is expected to rebound a bit in 2010, say industry watchers. For instance, more than 75 percent of the service providers polled by EquaTerra in the third quarter of this year reported continued growth in their deal pipeline, which was up 10 percent from the previous quarter and 34 percent from the same period last year.
But don’t expect too robust a revival. Outsourcing consultancy Everest predicts that although suppliers will see a resurgence in demand for IT and business process outsourcing services in 2009, growth rates are unlikely to return to pre-2008 levels.
Both suppliers and outsourcing customers could be in for a bumpy ride in 2010. Here are 10 trends …
