Managing Offshore IT

My blog entry from a few months ago “Offshoring BoP and Tandoori Nights in Texas” resonated with a few readers who commented in agreement. Gowrish Bhaskar points out how he experienced the same in some places in Europe where restaurants and suites are getting guests from India. On similar lines, I was reading and reflecting on some of the ideas in Malcolm Gladwell’s recent bestseller “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” The book is a page-turner, sprinkled with several anecdotes and contextual stories. Though I normally post my reviews of books on Amazon and not on this blog, ideas in the book resonated with the theme in my earlier blog entry. It pertains to Gladwell’s analysis of “The Warren Harding Error: Whey we fall for tall, dark, and handsome men.”

In the chapter, while analyzing an experiment at Chicago area car dealers, he points to how “Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $2,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayers’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayeres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.”

With my distinctly South Asian features and accent, I am no Warren Harding but I got to experience and observe the reversal of the ‘error’ that Gladwell points to. In the early nineties, when I first landed in the US, and was looking for a car at the local auto dealership in the heart of the Midwest – Kentucky – the salesman wouldn’t give me the time of the day. I was distinctly ‘foreign,’ probably without a credit history, with questionable finances. The salesman literally told me that to my face (something the dealership later apologized for when I wrote to the manager, but that’s a different story).

Fast forward to present day. It is interesting to observe how younger South Asian and Indian expat ‘kids’ on offshore engagements, walking into a Honda, Toyota or other auto dealerships get kid-glove treatments (pun intended). It is probably because in the blink of an eye, the sales-men/women now equate them to the ‘white male’ in Gladwell’s narrative: seen as knowledgeable, internet savvy and possibly with a high-tech job that pays well. This ‘thin slicing’ happens subconsciously even while the kid walks into a dealership, thanks in part to the hype over the flattening world (apologies Tom Friedman) and buzz in the media over offshoring. A phenomenon, one could call the reverse of Gladwell’s description of spotting the sucker: spotting the buyer!

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 01:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Hamm, in his recent blog questions “Does Outsourcing Retard Innovation?.” in the brief blog, he hypothesizes  how “Accenture, IBM, and the Indian tech services outfits talk a lot about transformational services, but, it seems, not a lot of clients are taking them up on it.” Nothing innovative in this statement! (pun intended). Steve’s blog takes off from his discussion with Bob Suh, Accenture’s chief technology strategist whose conclusion seems to be similar to a BCG survey from a few months ago. [my blog: Execs frustrated by lack of innovation : Can offshoring help?]

Innovation -- or lack of innovation -- is a perennial topic among management thinkers and technologists. Add to this the fact that no executive, manager or architect worth his/her salt would admit to a lack of innovativeness, just as no organization or service provider would admit to lack of innovative solutions or offerings.

Speaking of business-technology innovation, I came across an interesting Wall Street Journal blog entry [Techies to Microsoft: Save Windows XP] that talks about how “so far, most businesses have resisted switching to Vista,” Microsoft’s upgraded operating system. Infosys as Microsoft’s partner has innovative solutions to help clients migrate across operating systems. Our techies have been involved in several recent engagements helping clients migrate to Vista.

Here is a dichotomy. Vista is a great - one can say innovative - leap over XP. However, innovation in an operating system alone does not translate to business value (though leveraging some of the newer features most certainly will). In an ideal world, all my clients would want to upgrade to the latest-greatest versions of technologies and tools; but we don’t live in an ideal world, do we? There are going to be clients similar to the ones mentioned in the WSJ blog that want to continue to squeeze the maximum out of the existing investments in platform and systems. For them, innovation could lie elsewhere in the value chain, not necessarily in a technology upgrade life-cycle. What would I recommend to such a hypothetical client? Would it be innovative if my recommendation were aligned with their corporate strategy rather than in leveraging the innovativeness of the new OS?

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 02:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was reflecting on the nature of engagements that some of our teams undertake, more because of the fact that the engagements mirror the portfolio owned by CIOs, essentially trends in typical IT shops and it is a no-brainer: a larger percentage of work involves maintenance and sustenance of IT systems. [ref: Software maintenance - who's interested?]

The challenge in such (application maintenance management) scenarios is not in the intricacy of work but the fact that it is not seen as sexy or cool by many developers, and software engineers, and even less so by most software architects. The reason is obvious: the industry has glamorized new development as being ‘creative’ while labeling maintenance to an equivalent of ‘grunt work.’ Given this mindset, it wouldn’t make sense for me to even attempt making an argument for why architects should get more involved in ‘legacy’ work but here it goes anyways.

Industry analysts are always talking about volume of maintenance work in the IT industry, more specifically impact of such volumes on the growth to services companies. If there is a lot of work to be done and fewer experts to do it, the law of demand-and-supply will ensure career mobility.

There are several technology challenges across industry verticals and organizations waiting for inputs from good technologists. For instance, an engagement that an architect in my team is working on involves analyzing mainframe Batch job flows and recommending the (obvious) flaws, drawing on the best practices that we (Infosys) have seen elsewhere. In this instance, there is no motivation or appetite for ‘legacy modernization,’ which means the architect has an opportunity to explore optimization techniques (possibly using the same 'legacy' technology)

Another similar issue I see client leaders talk about is the high MIPS usage and opportunities to optimize it. The reasoning is simple: the knowhow to measure MIPS utilization on mainframes exists, and what can be measured can be improved. Here the reasoning is more geared towards optimization rather than legacy modernization (say, migrating MIPS consuming mainframe applications to other platforms: Java, LAMP or Microsoft).

In a sense, it boil down to examining the basics of the given architecture and platform, and examining opportunities to improve rather than re-architect. Which brings us to an interesting opportunity shaping up in the industry: if many in the industry are predicting a resurgence in demand for COBOL programmers [eg. COBOL Today and Tomorrow], surely there is a case to be made for the resurgence in demand for mainframe applications architects?

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I came across an interesting blog post in WSJ talking about “Toughening Up Chief Information Officers,” how Chief information officer jobs are getting ever more demanding. The blog quotes Egon Zehnder (an executive recruiter) saying “Over the past 10 years, CIOs’ jobs have morphed from technical-oriented roles to increasingly becoming business partners who can help influence a company’s strategy.”

I  found it interesting that the WSJ blog also adds that “recent Egon Zehnder CIO survey found a quarter of respondents thought they would be changing their roles within a year, with 60% saying they believed they would change jobs within two years. Of those, one in ten respondents said they expected to move into non-tech jobs and take on a more business-oriented and operational role within a company.” Note the transient nature of a CIO's job that the blog is alluding to?

Nothing surprising here…. but it makes me wonder if the shift is moving CIO’s role closer to that of General Managers. In which case, one would perhaps find an answer to Prof. Andrew McAfee’s blog musing “Is General Management Being Transformed by IT?”

Prof. McAfee makes a few interesting observations in his blog asking “If IT is so great for general managers, why are so many of them so lukewarm on it?  Why don’t more of them believe in the power of technology? Are they just missing the boat?  Or are we?” I would add the following corollary to the questions: Can CIOs and IT executives help transform General Management? 

Here’s a hypothesis: CIO’s who are looking to “take on a more business-oriented and operational role within a company” should seek out General Management responsibility. Which means, they should delegate more of their “operational IT” taks. In many cases, the operational IT responsibilities could/should be successfully delegated to a sourcing partner.

Even before I can elaborate on this hypothesis, I can see several challenges. The first on the list would be the vendor management dynamics. Echoing this, Mark Kobayashi-Hillary blogs “How many times has outsourcing gone wrong, not because of a hopeless supplier, but because the company buying the service just can’t interact with the supplier?”

There is a strong business case for CIO’s to delegate some of their responsibilities to their sourcing partners, especially if over 60% believe they would change jobs within two years. One can make an argument that even many sourcing contracts last much longer than that; so I wonder why are consultants seen as and treated as outsiders and not stakeholders?

There are several instances where my colleagues have successfully graduated to being “trusted advisors” to CIOs, helping them expand beyond their traditional boundaries. However, those instances are not a norm for all clients ... and the trend is much less widespread in the industry. Why is it so?

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)