Managing Offshore IT

I got around to reading the insightful write-up “The Next Revolution in Productivity” published in the recent issue of Harvard Business Review [HBR, June 2008, also Arvindra Sehmi's blog] in which the authors make a case for business process re-engineering using Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The authors write how “It is becoming possible to design many business activities as Lego-like software components that can be easily put together and taken apart;” The LEGO analogy is succinct and consultants are sure to pick on this: my colleague Binooj has already begun using it successfully to articulate SOA to clients!. One can even argue that technologists are already sold on SOA [Ref EDS’s corporate blog: Has SOA Emerged to be the Dominant Design in Software Architecture?] so the real logical step would be to take a top-down, business centric view. 

In making a case for SOA, the authors of the HBR writeup observe that bigger challenge is to ensure business alignment:

“the gulf between corporate leaders and their IT departments. Chief executives have tended to see SOA as merely the next big thing being pushed by their CIOs and to assume that it, too, will end up costing a fortune without delivering commensurate benefits. Partly because of this fear and partly because CIOs have not understood or have had trouble articulating what SOA makes possible, most CEOs have authorized their IT departments to deploy it in a limited fashion – to improve and lower the cost of maintaining the software supporting existing processes. As a result, most companies that have embraced SOA have applied it without first rethinking the design of their businesses. This omission means they have overlooked SOA’s greatest value: the opportunity to create much more focused, efficient, and flexible organizational structures.”

This theme hits home closer since it echoes an opportunity that Binooj and I, with other colleagues, have been working on of late. A large company in the entertainment industry seems to be coming to grips with a unique problem: preparing for growth. The CIO realizes that his firm has planned on a multinational growth strategy by investing in new markets including China and Singapore while continuing to grow the market in the US. The stated vision is to grow the business from $2 Billion to over $5 Billion in the next 3 years. As the owner of IT systems, he is grappling with a unique challenge: how to ensure that the software systems currently in place scale up while also ensuring that new systems that will be deployed integrate well into the Enterprise Architecture. We are working with the CIO’s team to help map the technology roadmap to the business strategy so it would not be fair for me to speculate on the specifics; but needless to say, SOA is certainly one of the LEGO blocks to help integrate the other business LEGO blocks.

In case you are wondering about the co-relation between SOA and offshoring IT (the theme of this blog), my employer like many large service firms has an extensive offering to help strategize and implement SOA

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Many of my peers enjoy the privilege of being trusted advisors to clients we work with, though I guess this comes with a lot of responsibility too. I use the phrase with caution since in our industry misuse of terminologies are rampant. In a sense, the term ‘trusted advisor’ is akin to another concept of ‘thought leader:’ every technologist and consultant worth her/his salt wants to be in that position though many don’t have a clue of what it takes to be one, or even to continue down the path when closer to that utopian goal.

Case in point, I am on the road this week, traveling with a client team that is embarking on a large integration [SOA] initiative. As is to be expected, they have floated Request for Information (RFI) to software platform vendors and are in the process of continuing down a deeper technical evaluation.

Since an existing Infosys team is already engaged with the client in the application development space, they looked to us for advisory assistance during this exercise. The request came at extremely short notice and we managed to quickly put together a team to for required support to the client and I offered to join them in person. A few interesting aspects jumped out during the exercise:

• We traveled to two large software vendors headquartered in the West Coast - that I shall not name for obvious reasons – where the vendors put together a series of secessions that included the usual Dog and Pony show along with sessions that were more customized deep-dives with their internal product experts
•  The client was already aware that we had expertise in the platforms and the fact that we were also tier-1 alliance partners to the vendors being evaluated so the expectation was clear: be our trusted [read impartial] advisor in this engagement
• My team did factor in the yin-yang from our internal alliance management groups, each of which had an interest in positioning the specific vendor (alliance partner) for obvious reasons: the vendors were leaning on our alliance teams. 
• Another obvious dynamic that my team in this engagement has to watch out for: client’s projects are downstream work for service providers. But in our eagerness to get started on the work, we should not spur them towards a decision.

While the evaluation is proceeding as expected, my eye remains on the ball :: translating the results of this exercise and evaluation into a strategy that the client’s executives can propose to their stakeholders … which will then have to get projectized…. And will hopefully get executed using our Global Delivery model

The horses are just out of the gate, so it would be hard for me to even speculate on the direction of the evaluation; but stay tuned.

Ps: And in case you are wondering, client’s advisors don’t get the trinkets and t-shirts while accompanying them to the vendor’s company store. :-(

Posted by Mohan Babu K. at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)