Why Cultural Fit Can Make or Break Your Sourcing Operation
March 22nd, 2011
Get a better grip on culture and sourcing at Nearshore Nexus - April 26 – in NYC. Jane Siegel, of Carnegie Mellon, will be among the 20+ expert speakers
Part II: Interview with Jane Siegel of Carnegie Mellon
By Tarun George
Buy-side clients are well versed in evaluating ‘hard issues’ like wage rates, infrastructure costs and investment incentives, but what about the ‘soft issue’ of cultural alignment? In other words, is there a cultural fit between your team at home and your service provider’s team offshore – and does that even matter? Jane Siegel, Director of IT Sqc and Senior Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks that culture should be one of the hard issues that you consider before outsourcing your project. As she says, many offshore relationships fail because of a failed understanding of cultural differences.
How to Stop Culture from Killing Your Offshore Deals
October 20th, 2009Steve Rudderham, VP, Client Engagement, Capgemini: “Problems culminate when customers and providers don’t spend enough time with each other”
Julia Santos, Director, Worldwide Strategic Outsourcing, Johnson & Johnson: “My way of communication and dealing with providers in India and LatAm is different. Because of the culture in Asia – it’s hard to just say no.”
Maurizio Velasquez, Commercial and BDVP Teledatos S.A., based in Colombia: “From a Latin perspective –we like to have the human approach.”
When people talk about “culture” in offshoring, what are they really getting at? It’s a question I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I listen to people talk about culture as a fundamentally critical issue that has to be managed, watched over and in the most direct way – overcome.
Culture can, let’s face it, really screw up an offshoring deal. When I lived in Japan several years ago, I had my own taste of cultural “adjustment” learning quickly that if you’re out on the street and lost – people would rather give you bad directions than deliver the embarrassing news that the place you were trying to get to is far, far away.
Take that example, enlarge it and install it into a business environment, where both providers and customers may rely on increasingly sophisticated processes and modern technology tools to conduct business, but the sum result of that collaboration is intended to be something the client values and the provider understands thoroughly.
How Widespread are Cultural Breakdowns?
Research released recently by Boston-based Vantage Partners shows that culture is an issue that has to be reckoned with head on. The expanding gap between client expectation and provider service delivery – often referred to as “scope creep” – is at the heart of many deals that go bad.
Do Cultural Barriers Hamper US-Latin America Outsourcing?
April 17th, 2009One of the things I have heard repeatedly in my conversations with near shore sourcing partners in Latin America and the Caribbean is there has been a noticeable shift in the last two years away from India, in favor of near 
shore providers. Take Delta Airlines, for example, which transitioned much of its contact center operations from India to Jamaica. Why did Delta make this move?
Part of the reason, I’m told, is Jamaica is culturally more aligned with the core of Delta’s customer base – US citizens. Other factors include the familiar issues that make near-shoring so popular: similar time zones, closer physical proximity and English-as-a-first language capabilities.
Cultural familiarity is a real issue with real impacts. When I lived in Japan during the 90s, I frequently observed the “mum effect”, where a colleague or partner who possessed negative or “bad news” …
