Entrepreneurial IT, Innovation and Offshoring
I was skimming through John Ribeiro's recent Infoworld article and began pondering over the points raised where he talks about how IBM's SOA centers in India and China are driving nimble services. The author argues how IBM is taking the promise of SOA reusability a step further: setting up SOA Solutions Centers at Pune, India, and Beijing. Their charter: to identify and create composite business services that can be reused by other customers in the same industry.
The article made for interesting reading, especially the trends in globalization of innovation and R&D can be seen in many large service organizations, including Infosys.
There is a distinct parallel to John’s article and the recent Business Week blog entry by Steve Hamm who makes a mention of Infosys’ research where he says “The company uses a tool it created, called InFlux, which captures a client's business requirements and transforms them into an IT plan. The company last May started holding day-long customer innovation workshops, one-on-one with a customer, where it listens to what the customer wants to do with its IT and business processes and then tries to come up with projects where the two sides can co-create solutions for the customer.”
Even the technologist-blogger Sadagopan calls out such "disruptive technologies" in his recent blog predicting trends for 2007: "Offshore majors would work on coming out with a viable approach towards offerings centered on disruptive technologies like SaaS. Global majors may work hard to demonstrate better value add to their customers leveraging their offshore presence."
The implicit message in all these viewpoints and blogs is very clear: Learn to leverage innovation and R&D from global players…(or be left behind?!)
Comments
Good article
Posted by: Ram | January 13, 2007 07:57 PM
Yes it is a good article because it points to the future of this crazy business. The future is innovation and R&D and learning to manage such things as fuzzy projects. (Don't bother searching for the phrase bcz I just made it up). I mean, in the past, you had to make each project clearly defined and did not allow your outsourcing partner any latitude to innovate. Now, you are more likely to hire a partner who is not only willing to figure out how to accomplish a project, but expects it.
As a Software Development Center in the Philippines, we now hire Software Engineers who have a definite tendency to "think." What a concept! They expect to be given the broad strokes for a project and then figure out how to accomplish it within a minimum amount of time and within budget.
anyhow, nice article, indeed.
Jerry C for icatchit.com
Posted by: Jerry C | March 6, 2007 06:42 AM
Glad to note that you too are expecting Engineers to "think."
Yes, this is certainly a move up the 'value chain' Yes, I realize as I write: move-up-value-chain is a utopian promise that consultants have been making for ages… but now we are seeing it in action.
Posted by: Mohan | March 7, 2007 09:06 PM