In a previous blog post, based on TEC’s outsourcing selection criteria, I summarized 6 types of experiences that a buyer should consider when choosing the best provider for application software outsourcing projects. Since then, my interest has been raised to the level of taking a further look into outsourcing buyers’ requirements for their potential providers’ expertise in a real selection process. Thanks to TEC’s Outsourcing Evaluation Center, users are able to identify their high-level requirements, run outsourcing service comparisons, and receive a short list of qualified providers. I was also able to look at the statistics of these high-level requirements and found out something that might be interesting for both outsourcing buyers and providers. Read the rest of this entry »

When there is an outsourcing failure in the application software area, “poor partner performance” is a reason that frequently appears in the post-mortem report. But, who is responsible for choosing the outsourcing provider? Instead of blaming the lousy job that you’ve received, it is more helpful to investigate how you have ended up with this incapable partner if you don’t want to fall into the same trap again.

You can never be too careful when choosing outsourcing partners and you should look through all the aspects or features of your candidates that will affect your selection decisions. Some of the aspects (e.g., business size, level of certifications, and employee educational level) are quite explicit, but aspects such as development methodology, skills, and experiences are harder to measure during the selection process. One good approach to examining those inexplicit aspects is to break them into finer granularity and make them more measurable.

In this blog post, we’ll look at one single but very important aspect—experience. And to give you a better grip on matching partners’ experiences with your business needs, we’ve broken experience down into six main types. Read the rest of this entry »

If you know nothing about a company, you should be able to figure out the bare essentials by visiting its About Us page, right?

Turns out this is only true sometimes.

When visiting the Digg website, for example. The first line on Digg’s About page is this: “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.”

Neat, huh? One click and sixteen words after visiting the site, you know, in a nutshell, what they do. Read another fifty or so words and you’ll find out that content is displayed and ranked based on votes from users. Go further and you’ll find out how that works. The information is there, and it’s not hard to find.

Enterprise software vendors, by contrast, don’t always provide such clear information so concisely. To show you what I mean, I looked at the About Us pages of the ten vendors listed in The New and the Noteworthy: 2008 Vendor Wrap-up, published late last year on this blog.

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I was positively staggered to read the article “Should North Americans Send More Software Development Work to China?” Perhaps my opinions are underlined with a bias of the South Indian (you’ll find Bangalore in those parts) variety, a fierce one at that too (which is why I have long abstained from writing the article “Why Indian outsourcing is the next best thing to sliced bread”). Nevertheless, I maintain that the article does not present an objective view of the state of outsourcing to China & India. Do read on, because as fiercely competitive as we Indians are, we are just as capable of self-inquiry and mindfulness.

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