Brave For Free

Sitting within view of a three hundred year old pleasure palace, I was part of a lively discussion yesterday on what motivated us into coming back to India. I moved to the USA relatively late, having traveled back and forth for something like a decade before I decided to change residences in 2003, just after 9/11. When I finally did move to New York, I was already an experienced hand at American basic like driving a car and ordering at McDonalds. Most of my friends, on the other hand, had been dunked in cold straight out of college. Returning, for me, was thus somewhat different - I had not grown the same roots that people who had lived there a decade or more had. It was still a very large move nevertheless, not quite like moving back to Mumbai after a few years in Bangalore. America wasn't just another location change, it was the adoption of a different way of life that was very attractive in many ways. Coming back was therefore an event of some consequence, even if you had just l...

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Who Question Once you've clarified why you're looking for an outsource partner and also which pieces to outsource, you're faced with the next big question – who? What should you look for in your potential outsourcing partner? The choice, I put to you, comes down to four linked characteristics. Ability The first characteristic, of course, is ability. A vendor cannot be under consideration at all if the basic ability to handle whatever you plan to outsource is not present. This is not always an easy thing to judge, especi...

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The What Question The second in the series deals with the what – choosing which parts of IT can be and should be outsourced to a partner. Of course, one must first decide how one defines "parts of IT" in the first place – and different companies have slightly different approaches. Some will do it by business unit, others by geography, reporting structures or cost head. I have found it most convenient to consider any application , function or service a s a candidate for outsourcing. Applications are software-hardware combinations,...

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Why Question Why outsource? Given that a trillion-dollar industry has crowded a lot of people into Bangalore and made more than one driver rich, it seems a little late to ask this question. However, this isn't really about outsourcing being good or bad per se. Bloggers like us love to wallow in theoretical questions; companies usually want answers to more prosaic stuff. The question really is, why should a company be looking for an outsource partner ?   I've divided the universe into two simple flavours – Tactical and Str...