Year of the App Redux

It’s another “year of the app” for 2012 as more and more clients will expect any of the goods and services we offer to be available on their iPhones and Droids. A failure to include those elements in the tool set will invariably lead to charges that the provider lacks “true” customer service.

More Face Time in 2012

While technology will play a greater role, it’s also evident that there will be a greater level of “touch” required for some clients who will see the advent of e-options as the surrender of personal contact. They will push back and demand true face time as well as on-site commitments. Coupled with this, expect Indian offshoring to see its first decline in quite a few years, thanks in part to the need for physical contact and Read more …

Now that approximately half the IT shop is outsourced (on average) either on, near, or offshore, the transaction itself is hardly novel. What remains difficult, however, is getting the results one wanted when the deal was set up. Both academia and the commercial world have started to recognize the importance of the individuals that get those results, not just those who put the deals together.

With regard to sourcing, I see 2012 as the year of the contract manager. More universities will offer contract management as a degree (not just a module), yet it will take some time for the students to enter the marketplace. The professional contract management associations will have a boom in membership (and for those with a job board, an increase in postings). But the demand for good contract managers will outstrip supply — next year Read more …

For every vendor presentation claiming that cloud computing is an unprecedented revolution, there is an analyst paper denouncing the hyperbole. Every new example of IT goes through this phase, just as surely as a child goes through the “terrible twos” — and at about the same age.

When a concept does not catch on, the providers and analyst firms have a ready solution: rename and restart. The move to “pay per view” use of externally hosted IT resources was given several other names over the past decade, and a new bout of fever erupted each time; two examples are “utility computing” coined by Sun and HP (2000) and “on-demand computing” by IBM (2002).

No one denounced the cloud computing hype as colorfully as Oracle’s Larry Ellison during a financial analyst conference in September 2009: “I have no idea what anyone Read more …

The fast rise of software talent marketplaces like oDesk and uTest represents a profound transformation. Software is no more a world of places – Silicon Valley, Seattle, Bangalore, Krakow or Tel Aviv. Rather, software is fast becoming a world of work streams. These streams are tied together through social networking and collaborative techniques in which virtual team spaces replace the site, the conference room, the metaphorical shelf on which the software artifacts are stored… and the water cooler.

Three trends drive this transformation in software from a world of places to a world of streams:

Shortage of talent. Have you recently tried to hire highly skilled programmers in areas such as mobile applications or cloud computing? No matter where you site might be located, most of the skills you need in these critical domains are not within a Read more …

Offshoring passes the early adopter stage – the early adoption bugs (customer care, black & white view of specifications, etc) have been largely worked out now, particularly in India.  Customers have gotten better at specifications and remote management – moving away from the “do what I meant, not what I specified” approach to a more professional approach.  Indian firm are better at client management, with most having onshore support cells.  Even with the labor arbitrage decreasing, more value is being added.  This is the year offshoring will no longer be a novelty, but a mandatory aspect of the business case for delivering IT.  Although, many organizations will continue to use a politically acceptable onshore brand that has offshore operations, rather than offshore direct. Cloud backlash – speaking of the adoption curve, the current “edition” of cloud is still in the Read more …

The rapid growth of Cloud Computing has been fueled by a combination of economic and technological factors, but sustained by the immediate business benefits which have clearly demonstrated that it is not just another over-hyped tech trend. I expect this market to grow even more rapidly as organizations of all sizes move from asking “What is Cloud Computing and why is it important?” to “Where and how can I capitalize on the Cloud?”

These organizations will leverage a combination of public, private and community Cloud solutions. They will also migrate to SaaS-based enterprise applications which include social networking capabilities similar to those found in Salesforce.com Chatter. A growing number of organizations will also capitalize on a widening array of Cloud-based Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions and “datamarts”, as well as Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) alternatives. In sum, the rapidly evolving Cloud Computing Read more …

The trends are clear. There will be more and more outsourcing as we proceed through the 21st century. On-demand, “pay-by-the-drink,” and related models will dominate technology delivery for the foreseeable future — and very likely permanently. Lack of expertise in the US is accelerating this trend. So where does this leave us? With a new requirement: vendor management.

Vendor management is a broad area. Let’s explore the strategic highlights.

First, you need a comprehensive sourcing strategy and inevitably a strategy driven by the results of a core competency assessment. (Yes, you have to do this again.) The essential questions here revolve around the core/noncore relationship between technology and your business models and processes. Put another way, is there something absolutely unique about the role that technology plays at your company, or is technology essentially operational, a commodity you leverage to Read more …

“Partnering” — besides being a mandatory buzzword — is a curious term. Nowadays, instead of taking over a company, we partner with it. We don’t sell anything anymore; we partner. And now, rather than outsourcing, we create strategic partnerships. While the goal of an amicable and mutually rewarding relationship is admirable, what each party truly expects from the other in an outsourcing arrangement formed under a “partnering vision” is quite different.

The client often wants a “well-behaving provider.” But what the client means by “well-behaving” is a provider that accepts nearly infinite scope creep without a commensurate increase in price, immediately reacts to the client’s ad hoc needs (at no charge), and performs what the client really meant in the specification instead of what was actually written and quoted (again, at no charge) — all the while acting under a Read more …

Outsourcing big is not always beautiful. Indeed, sometimes outsourcing big can be a blunder. For example, on Friday, Information Age reported a tally of the UK government’s project management track record, and found that IT projects count among its worst failures. Why? “Government needs to stop thinking that when it comes to procuring IT systems, big is always beautiful,” says shadow chancellor George Osborne. “We need to move in the direction of what are known as ‘open standards’ – in effect, creating a common language for government IT,” he said, which would mean “big projects can be split into smaller elements, which can be delivered by different suppliers and then bolted together”.

Even in Texas, big isn’t always beautiful. Texas was an early advocate of large scale outsourcing of government work, with lawmakers in 2005 ordering agencies to Read more …

The recent outage of Google Gmail, which also affected users of Google Apps (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) is yet one more reminder of how organizations need to carefully weigh the pros and cons of using on-demand or cloud-based applications and services. As I wrote last August, in response to a larger outage in which Gmail and Apps were down for about 15 hours (and have copied below), I don’t believe that Gmail and Google Apps are really up to supporting large, enterprise end-user organizations at this time. I do think they can be considered useful for consumers and for some small companies, as well as for specific departments, groups, and selective applications. In fact, I use Google Docs and Gmail sometimes when I’m on the road.

Google Apps and Gmail Crash: Cloud Computing’s Limitations Exposed? Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture E-Mail Read more …