Managing Offshore IT

Wall Street Journal had an interesting article “Firms Get Creative To Work Around Visa Bottlenecks” that looks at different aspects of challenges faced by employers planning for foreign-born candidates in America.

As organizations globalize and continue to hire the topic is sure to generate interest among sourcing managers.

The article quotes Leslie Dahan, an immigration lawyer who “counseled Intel's hiring managers on their options for unsuccessful visa candidates, crafting "decision trees" to help managers navigate tricky immigration rules. The next round of visas won't take effect until October 2008, so managers had to find alternatives to cover roughly 18 months.” A decision tree of this kind is something most offshoring managers have to equip themselves with. Case in point: Sometime ago, an architect in my team had to roll out of a critical engagement because the ‘six year’ limit on his H1 work visa was expiring. Our legal advisers counseled that he could not continue to be on the payroll and might even have to leave the country.  Fortunately for him, his wife, who was on another H1 visa holder, was able to claim him as a ‘dependent’ and he moved his status to a dependent visa (while going off payroll). A few months after that, his wife was granted a permanent residence (and as a dependent, he too got his status reinstated). This is just a small manifestation of the myriad visa rules that sourcing managers typically have to contend with at a cost to operating business.

Immigration and global mobility is not always beneficial to every firm. If a talent is needed in one part of the world, surely someone else is loosing out on that talent; right? Well, Sometimes we too are at the receiving end.  Occasionally employees self-file for immigration to countries where they see themselves migrating to. Countries like Australia, Canada, UK and others have provisions for educated, skilled professionals to self-sponsor their immigration paperwork. On successful processing of such immigration applications they can move to their destined land. Now, what can managers tell employees who walk up and say “I’ve successfully got my immigration to Canada, and need to be there next month to retain my immigrant status.” [Factoid: my employer does have an office in Canada, and occasionally accommodates such requests from employees where there is a mutually beneficial fitment]. Not all requests are successful though. In which case, the employee decides to part ways to pursue his/her goals.

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While the jury is debating on whether offshoring can help in innovation [Execs frustrated by lack of innovation : Can offshoring help?]… offshoring companies, including Infosys are certainly trying to help seed innovation.

Interesting announcement: ACM and Infosys Technologies Announce New Award to Recognize Contemporary Computing Research and Innovaton

Jim Horning comments: "The Grace Murray Hopper Award is for a contribution made before age 35. The new ACM / Infosys Foundation Award does not have such a strict definition of "young." Fortunately, there is not a shortage of stellar young contributors, by either definition. ACM thinks there is room for both awards."

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business Week features an article “India's Talent Gets Loads Of TLC” that talks about how India’s “Its labor supply is no longer endless.”  This is a topic of perennial interest to technology managers. The article begins with

A visit to Infosys Technologies' Mysore campus [An unofficial pictorial of the Mysore campus on Flickr]  highlights the extraordinary measures Indian companies are resorting to these days to attract and retain top talent. The 334-acre site boasts a multiplex theater shaped like a giant white dome, four huge food courts, 96 hotel-like guest houses, and a stylish activity center with a gym, pool hall, and eight-lane bowling alley. Last year the outsourcing company trained 20,000 recruits in everything from software writing to teamwork. Expansions under way will enable Infosys to train twice as many. "When I heard IBM's presentation at a job fair, they talked a lot about their brand and innovation but not much about training," says Sanjay Joshi, 22, a graduate of MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology in Bangalore. "That's why being at Infosys is the Indian middle-class dream."

As expected, the article has generated a barrage of blog responses:

A few points that bloggers and analysts ignore:

• The “labor supply” was never “endless” to begin with. Technical education and training India, especially focused on IT really took off during the past decade, and continues to try to catch up with the ever growing global “market demand.” Nothing new here!
• Discussions on 'talent management seem to veer off on ‘careers’ in domestic vs. multinationals … or product vs. software service companies (or captives vs. service providers) etc. Fact of the matter is that a career decision is hard enough without having to bring these factors into the equation.
• Analysts (and bloggers) seem to forget ‘youngsters’ graduating from schools want to be trained and cut their teeth on live projects where they can apply their talent… why do they forget how they began their careers out of school? 
• Taking a simplified view of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the ‘talent’ in India, just like educated and energetic workforce elsewhere in the globe, look for Self-actualization more than just the ‘basic’ needs. A career in IT is a ticket to be a part of the global marketplace, opportunity to travel to corners of the globe; if one can paraphrase the old adage, Join a global IT company & See the world seems to be the new mantra. Employers who can satisfy this urge are going to attract and retain talent

The flip side of these viewpoints: IT ‘workers’ are no longer just ‘resources’ they are being wooed as ‘talent’ ... which if you think of it is a good thing for the talent and talent managers; right?

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It was interesting to read Mark Kobayashi-Hillary muse about “Execs frustrated by lack of innovation” His blog talks about
The fourth annual global survey and report on innovation from the strategy consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) describes how executives are getting more and more frustrated with the returns (or lack of) from innovation efforts. The report also shows those same executives recognising that innovation is now essential for performance and growth. For the third year in a row, Apple has been crowned as the world’s most innovative company. Apple is followed by Google, Toyota, General Electric, Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble.

Now this is a topic one reads about frequently in different contexts, meaning different things to different folks.

In the offshoring context, innovation (or lack of it) is a general musing by journalists about how software service firms (read offshoring firms) are not innovating enough… or fail to be moving up the value chain. While much of this is purely rhetoric, one cannot really make a persuasive argument one way or the other [Example,  journalists who bemoan lack of innovation also pick up on stories of how service firms are innovating offshore]. Extending this argument, among the most innovative companies listed in the BCG list, Microsoft has also been trying to expand in the online world both by innovating … and by buying those who are innovating. 
Now what gives?

And speaking of innovation Jithesh Sathyan, from Infosys was recently granted a patent by the USPOT for an idea for “Displaying holographic three dimensional images” About his patented idea, Jithesh says "Current developments in 3D are limited to virtual 3D – drawing images on a 3D mesh, increasing the resolution of the screen or having a different image for the left and right eye using stereoscopy. This patent is the first solution to provide an actual 3D experience on a wireless handset without any additional communication bandwidth requirements."

Of course, patenting of ideas like this are just the tip of the iceberg in our innovation ecosystem. I have written about how Infosys’ R&D culture, driven in part by SETLabs and other delivery groups provide ‘innovative’ solutions to our clients over and over.  Some of the innovation is driven by our popular global internship program  and by our campus connect initiative

Bottomline: innovation is an interesting topic to study, read and blog/write about… but to actually see it at work: to see innovation lead to something actionable, eventually ‘business value’ is another matter altogether…perhaps a topic for another blog?

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Regulars: this mid-week blog entry has less to do about sourcing and more about how Information Technology is shaping the Newspaper business (or is it the other way around?). Like many of my peers in the industry, I have been watching the Dow Jones buyout drama play out during the past few months with more than cursory interest.

A question that I have been musing about is how much have Internet and 'Web 2.0' Technologies attributed to the recent buyout of Dow Jones at a premium by Mr. Rupert Murdoch. My two cents on Newspapers and the New Paradigm, published in this week’s ACM’s ubiquity.  As always: inputs and comments welcome

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I came across an interesting blog entry by Basab on “The Importance of being Articulate” where he builds an argument based on his anecdotal observation of Indian and western business leaders in CNBC where he states “Another difference that is immediately evident is how articulate business leaders are on CNBC in the US compared to their counterparts in India. They are not only better tutored on how to handle the press and TV but they are just plain better speakers.”

There is some merit to the argument he is making though the reasons he states may be debatable. For this thread, we will use the definitions 2. 3. 4. and 5. from dictionary.com

Basab says “In the US, being articulate in your communication (both spoken and written) is assumed to be strongly correlated with intelligence, good education and a general sign of capability. The education system here emphasizes good writing and public-speaking skills. There are ample opportunities to develop public speaking skills from ‘Show-and-tell’ to debating clubs in the public school system. High achievers typically do speak well.” And this is where I disagree with his observation.

Larger software services firms (Infosys included) have invested in training and developing an ecosystem to provide “ample opportunities to develop public speaking skills from ‘Show-and-tell’ to debating clubs” in the organization. Technical graduates, even from Tier-2 and tier-3 towns and cities who are not as ‘articulate’ - read: comfortable in professional presentations or public speaking – are given sufficient opportunities to build on those skills. Case in point, during my stint offshore in Bangalore, I would occasionally travel to other metros to interview technical candidates to add to our growing pool of technology architects. I would interview some very good techies from smaller firms, who could answer technical problems, but could not articulate how, what and why in a succinct manner… typical consulting skills that I would be looking for. In my mind I would be mapping them to folks who had grown in our ecosystem, who were exposed to a lot more global clients and had an opportunity to travel and learn. 

I dedicated an entire chapter to aspects of communication in my book but didn’t dwell much on the specific aspects of being articulate in the context of the blog thread. Now, one could extend this musing to different dimensions:

• Do good techies need to be really ‘articulate’ ? [read: sophisticated or glib?]
• Are all western business leaders ‘articulate’?
• Aren’t foreign born business and technology leaders cut some slack when it comes to articulate public speaking?
• What about masking accents? [I have seen many of my Indian born colleagues get by very well in corporate America with their Indian accented English; And there are some who botch up basic grammar, trying to mask it by with a pseudo-American accent (or pronunciation)]

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)