Managing Offshore IT

It’s the Thanksgiving week in the US and the Christmas lights outside our office building come on tonight. Along with discussion of shopping deals, Black Friday and Turkeys, conversation will drift towards Christmas and the New Year…. Which means one thing: pundits, gurus and forecasters will roll-up their sleeves to make big predictions for “the year to come”  and the list is sure to contain the ‘usual suspects’ which is beginning to include Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Flash back to over a year ago, Business Week had a cover story on how “Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning.” Sure myspace, linkedin, youtube and Second Life have scores of Digerati excited. And surely some businesses have also jumped the bandwagon while a fewer entrepreneurs are raking billion-dollar valuations while academics like Andrew McAfee continue to ideate on “How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye” and researchers like Professor Murugesan begin compiling handbooks on Web 2.0, 3.0 and X.0

Not to be left behind, Infosys’ researchers are going full steam, studying and articulating aspects of the trends shaping up. Case in point is the research on adoption of Web 2.0 in Retail, financial and other verticals that some of our offshore researchers have published.

With all the analysts, entrepreneurs and academics going gung-ho on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, why is it that I get the nagging feeling that all the babble is little more than a storm in the teacup?

I guess I need to spend the Christmas break on getting to a point where I am comfortable advising CIOs and leaders that all this is (yet another) ‘business altering paradigm’ that they can sell to their business…. And more importantly, when they are talking with me, - in my avatar of Architect from a service provider -  help answer hard questions such as: what are the synergies between an organization’s offshoring strategies and Enterprise 2.0? How do these technologies help my top-line and bottom-line? 

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

During the past couple of weeks, I was in our Plano, Texas office interacting with fellow architects and academics participating in the Infosys CTO “Enterprise Architect” workshop. The myriad topics covered included aspects of technology management, generating animated discussion among participants. However, a self deprecating remark by a fellow Principal generated more than a few chuckles when he responded to the ability of architects to also market some of the solutions and ideas by stating “don’t we dream up marchitecture all the time?” After the guffaws over the remark subsided, I did a quick bit of googling and discovered that the term is used in the industry more than we realize. Peter Abrahams, uses the term in his essay to describe how “a Marchitecture is an architecture produced for marketing reasons, normally by a vendor. It is designed to put the vendor in the best possible light by emphasising the positive as well as hiding the negative.”

Luke Hohmann, in his writeup takes a slightly different view stating “Marketecture is the business perspective of the system's architecture. It embodies the complete business model, including the licensing and selling models, value propositions, technical details relevant to the customer, data sheets, competitive differentiation, brand elements, the mental model marketing is attempting to create for the customer, and the system's specific business objectives. Marketecture includes—as a necessary component for shared collaboration between the marketects, tarchitects, and developers—descriptions of functionality that are commonly included in marketing requirements documents (MRDs), use cases, and so forth."

Whether done to articulate the business purpose or to purely aid in marketing, architects, especially those working for software service vendors invariably get involved in different facets of defining Marchitectures. : Much of such involvement is benign:  during business development (and pre-sales) activities that include making pitch to customers, responding to Request for Proposals (RFPs) etc. Marketectures are also frequently developed for trade events and to showcase the firm’s capabilities in certain technology areas.

The real danger is when the ‘marchitects,’ architects conceptualizing marketectures, start believing that their solutions can really solve all customers’ problems [….If the only tool one has is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail ...].

And to answer the question in the title of my blog: sure your vendor’s Marchitecture can help you. The checks-and-balances to get you – the customers’ – solution architect and stakeholder to ensure that your vendor and service provider moves beyond Marketecture is simple; Ask the right questions:  

• Ask that the solution being architected fits your need (your specific requirements, and not of requirements ‘like yours’. The caveat is that you should have clearly defined requirements to begin with)
• Ask for how the specifications of the architecture meet your Non Functional Requirements (of course, if you have overlooked defining the NFRs…it is going to be tougher)
• And if I must add, caveat emptor.

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 02:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing the management guru Prof. C.K Prahlad talk eloquently about his idea of Bottom-of-pyramid (BoP)and how organizations and individuals around the globe are benefiting by skimming margins at the BoP of larger organizations and trends. For those of us in the business of offshoring, BoP seems to be everywhere. Case in point, I was in the Plano, at the Texas office of Infosys last week interacting with fellow architects and academics participating in the Infosys Certified CTO “Enterprise Architect” workshop. For the two-week long session, I stayed at a nearby hotel [Let’s call it XYZ suites]

I have been traveling on business regularly ever since I started my career in IT in the early nineties, more so in my current avatar of a consulting architect. So what made me reflect on BoP during this trip?

Well, the management of the suites, like many catering to business travelers, has a practice of organizing themed social-evenings with drinks and O'dourves for business travelers and guests. While checking in the desk-clerk asked if I liked Indian curry (Here-you-go, I thought, my mustache, brown skin and accent had not failed me yet again). However, he surprised me with his next remark: we have organized a tandoorie-special night on Tuesday for our guests, and we hope you would join us.

Even a few years ago, I would be taking pains of explaining to the restaurant waiter or Maître de – especially in the Mid-west in Anytown-America - that I was vegetarian: meaning no-meat please; and here I was, the heart of Texas-ribs being indulged in a Tandoorie night.

The reason was not hard to find: The Plano area is home to a number of hi-tech companies and also happens to be the world-headquarters of the tech giant EDS, which incidentally has a number of its staff moving between here and the offices in India. Hotels and restaurants in the area have realized that they are a part of the offshoring value-chain… however indirect: and what better way to nurture and retain clients than to cater to some of their tastes?

The illustration here is just tip of the iceberg. If you look around, businesses and entrepreneurs of all stripes seem to be benefiting from the business of global sourcing at the bottom-of-pyramid. Just a few random examples that come to mind:

• Writers and Columnists: The list begins with New York Times' Tom Friedman (of the Flat World fame), BusinessWeek's Steve Hamm, who also authors the Bangalore Tigers blog among others. [My book and blog is somewhere in the long tail of offshoring]
• Travel and hospitality industry: Travel agents, airlines, hotels, taxi cab companies etc etc…both in western and eastern countries.
• Builders and developers: developing ‘world class’ offshoring centers in India, Phillipines, China, Mexico and elsewhere is a big business that includes many local BoP players
• Communication service providers. Several examples here too if you look around.
• Other service providers
• Micro-level BoPs: I find it interesting that several individual technology managers also seem to moonlight as real-estate brokers. Some invest in flats and apartments to be rented out to fellow employees from offshoring firms….

Do feel free to add to the list

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)