At Dhara, we focus on three primary areas of service to our customers. These service areas include Strategic Support for the CIO, the implementation of new technology to improve the business, and general sourcing for projects.  In my blogs each week I want to dedicate at least one entry to each of the above areas.  On Fridays I plan to discuss sourcing issues and opportunities. 

I am a firm believer that in order to speak about trends, or issues, it is critical to have actually operated in the space.  In my long IT career, I have managed development areas that included out-sourced providers at the project level, the enterprise level, and as staff extensions to fill in the missing resource needs for our core resources.  My typical span of control for technology development, support, and operations has usually been in the fifty-to-two hundred associate range.  This will give you—the reader—an understanding of my bias when reviewing my Blog entries.

As an outsourced service provider, we of course believe in the wisdom of outsourcing.  As a business, we believe in win-win sustainable solutions to problems when we create partnerships with our stakeholders. 

Much has been written about the value of offshore development facilities.  One area that I have managed that has produced extremely good value is that of prototype development for new product concepts.  Assuming that you have control of your offshore facility’s intellectual property from an ownership and risk management perspective, the development of new tools and technologies can be very effectively done. 

In my own experience, we developed concepts of products in the States, with a very high degree of rigor.  This rigorous approach allowed our offshore engineers and architects to develop component specifications that our onshore team reviewed and approved.  It allowed software construction to be done in a rapid development methodology that allowed our onshore staff resources to review components as they were being constructed.  We were able to specify changes that needed to be made and see the results quickly. 

To manage the process we utilized a “follow the sun” development approach.  This allowed work to be completed overnight by us in the States and during the day in our facilities in the Pacific Rim.  It required a hand-offs policy at the end of our day and the beginning of the Asian day, and it was very effective for us. 

One of the biggest benefits for us is that it isolated our mainline staff to develop “test” concepts.  One of the things that every large development organization tries to do is to isolate mainline business support from things that might never happen.  In this way people do not fight to protect their turf when they think that their jobs might be threatened.  So, instead of creating "skunk works", projects done in semi-secret mode and not impacted by existing systems or thinking, here in the States, we simply were able to isolate the effort off shore.  Skunk works were named for the secret nature of the effort—in my experience they usually ended up creating more of a skunk like smell, rather than any tangible results.  By clearly defining the offshore work as a prototype development, we were able to limit the distraction to our mainline staff.  By developing the prototypes with rigorous design and building components, we were able to deliver working modules that were potentially reusable in the future for development of the actual products. 

These projects were successful because of the design and management rigor that was employed.  They would have been unsuccessful if we had simply created a high level concept in U.S. English in a three-page overview and had said, “Buy us one of these”.  The cultural and language differences would have been a disaster.  If you have not been to a third world or emerging economy culture, it is impossible to understand the environment in which people are working.  

Over the years I have been to the Pacific Rim on numerous occasions, but I had never been to India until last year.  I had seen a number of pictures of Bangalore and had read about it being the “Silicon Valley” of India.  As I got off of the plane in Bangalore, I realized that I had seen the ‘demo’ version of Bangalore, and that the reality of that city was far closer to that of Manila than to San Jose.  It was also the most peaceful I had ever felt in the world—probably because I felt genuinely welcomed there.   

My point is simple, the cultures and languages in Asia were different from those in the U.S.  We were successful in our development because we took these differences out of the equation by eliminating colloquialisms from our language and expectations from our minds.   

I remember being in Paris a few years ago, and the limo driver asked me if I was American.  I hesitantly answered, “Yes.”  He said that, for an American, I spoke awfully good English.   I realized then that, to be successful in any offshore endeavor, those traveling overseas need to have excellent English language communication skills.

In the coming weeks I will discuss other sourcing issues, based on my experienced point of view.  I will also explore new trends that can be applied to make sure that the promise of lower costs and higher quality is realized in your sourcing efforts. 

Fred Geiger
www.dharacg.com