Managing Offshore IT

We will need to reschedule our meeting for tomorrow.  I will have to be home tomorrow afternoon with my son who is sick.  We found out today he has strep throat.  My wife is out of town with her mom who is in the hospital, so I need to be home with the kids.  I still would like to meet on this and am hoping we can get together next week. 
Can you send a new invitation for next week?  I’m open Monday afternoon, Tuesday from 9 – 4, all day Wednesday, and Thursday after 2.
Thanks, and sorry for the last minute change.

And you would think that a seasoned road-warrior like myself would be slightly more prepared for this eventuality! During my drive back  from the airport, I was reflecting on the examples I had referenced in my book [Offshoring IT Services: Chapter 4] in the section “OF TECHIES AND TRAVEL.” And thankfully my ordeal wasn’t half as bad as experienced by some of our offshore folks traveling from halfway across the globe only to find that the client has canceled/postponed the project or meeting.

Fact remains that most of us in the business of sourcing continue to be at mercy of the culture where touch-and-feel-meetings continues to be the nature of business. This despite the fact that Video-conferencing technologies along with high-speed bandwidth have matured to a point where they are being used as serious business tools, albeit more for ‘internal’ business needs. Many Infosys teams routinely use VC and voice conferencing for internal meetings and most of our offices around the globe are equipped with state-of-the-art video-conferencing technologies and staff to support them. I had blogged about Video conferencing technologies earlier too. But it still makes one wonder why so few firms or sales-managers are able to nudge their clients towards adopting these technologies more often?

Is it topical that “Telepresence World 2008” conference is scheduled in London for today (In anticipation of the March 18 and 19); Speaking about the conference, Deb Shinder blogs “market research firm Frost & Sullivan announced that it expects revenues for the emerging telepresence industry to increase by nearly 850 percent in the next five years. It predicts total world-wide revenues will be around $1.4 billion by 2013.” Hopefully the gurus and analysts there will evolve strategies to nudge more of us towards VC.

Bottomline: While a few early adopters gain the cost benefits of the technology and also do some good for the global carbon footprint, I guess the rest of us will have to wait a few years for the Youtube generation to rise up the echelons of business and technology management to start driving wider adoption?!