Because we are building our IT outsourcing business, we are constantly searching the Web for new ideas about outsourcing. And we just might have found it in this article, “Outsourcing your leadership team: build it… or buy it?” This article is a fascinating look at the decision to either build a leadership team or outsource [...]
Since 1981, CAI has been a global leader focused on IT Outsourcing Services. Find key information and important announcements on CAI’s service offerings. Tweet This Post
What do CAI’s clients have to say about CAI? Clients share their background and working experience with CAI – and some memorable tidbits of information! Tweet This Post
The IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI) is an organization founded by CAI to improve the practice and management of software development and maintenance. Find out about upcoming events here. Tweet This Post
CAI is proud to sponsor the IT Metrics and Productivity Institutes’s (ITMPI) Conference on Wednesday, November 9th, in Conshohocken. There is an outstanding line-up of speakers. Please check out the following link for more details: http://www.itmpi.org/events/
Hope to see you there! – Rob
| It’s Not Too Late…It’s here NOW.
You still have time to be a part of the “Management 2.0 Challenge” Sponsored by: McKinsey & Company, in conjunction with Harvard Business Review, has invited management innovators from around the world to share their most progressive ideas on how the governing principles and tools of the Web can make our organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable. CAI, the founder and sponsor of the ITMPI, has submitted their idea on “Mass Wisdom with a Smart Management System” We are asking you to review our idea and help us determine . . . Do we have the knowledge needed to manage a business in a web-centric world? You can check out our submission at: www.managementexchange.com/hack/new-hack-07-wed-2011 In order to comment on our submission, please register first at |
We appreciate your help in making our Management 2.0 submission a success!
On Wednesday, June 8, 2011, CAI’s Ernie Dianastasis will be honored by DEL- MAR- VA COUNCIL of Boy Scouts as their “ Citizen of the Year “. This prestigious award is presented annually to an individual who has made significant contributions to the community. Past recipients include Alan Levin, Secretary, Delaware Economic Office, Bob Harra, President, Wilmington Trust, Rob Buccini, Buccini Polin and Connie Bond Stuart ,President, PNC Bank Delaware. This event will be held in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel DuPont. Congratulations, Ernie!!!
A focus of this blog has been IT outsourcing, and we’ve often discussed offshore outsourcing. Did you know that Computer Aid offers offshore outsourcing?
In addition to our Solution Centers throughout the eastern United States, we also have Solution Centers in Manila, Philippines, and Shanghai, China. Through all of these Solution Centers, we can put together a virtual team that can facilitate a Global Delivery.
The Solution Centers are equipped with video conference facilities, training rooms, conference rooms, reference library, executive offices, workout/relaxation facilities, hundreds of workstations, and space for expansion. A thorough recruitment and screening process coupled with highly effective coaching, mentoring, and training allows a first rate pool of technical talent to be made available to clients.
Not only is it possible to provide a full range of services using one or any combination of Solution Centers, but all Solution Centers are fully integrated with all our processes, procedures, and methodologies.
Take a look around for yourself. Let us know what you think about our work and services. By all means, contact us if you think you have a project that would be mutually beneficial or if you think your business is up to par and able to compete with us as a Solution Center in a part of the world into which we’ve not yet expanded.
Computer Aid has a sister organization, the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI). If you visit its site, you will find a plethora of information of all types related to the promotion of best practices in the areas of Software Process, Software Metrics, Software Estimation, and IT Governance.
We want to direct you to the schedule of free live webinars. If you scour the list (unfortunately at this time it is not searchable), you will find the following offshore topics that may be of interest to you:
And when you can’t attend, we record the webinars and provide them for free viewing for the first week after the webinar has aired. After that time, you can purchase access to the webinar for a nominal fee.
We invite you to explore the listing of outsourcing webinars in our webinar archives. There is a search feature that allows you to search either by category or by speaker. When we selected Outsourcing as our category, the site displayed the following webinars:
Look over the list of webinars and maybe purchase some. Tell us what you’ve learned, what you’d like to see us offer, and what you’d like to see improved.
One of the engagements we recently won was a joint venture to focus on helping law enforcement turn data into useful, actionable intelligence to counter terrorism, abate crime and better respond to emergency situations. As we grow into thought leaders in this field, we began to wonder what others were thinking about the very same topic.
In the article by Gerald Baron called, “Emergency Response, Warfare and the Coming Revolution in Decisionmaking [sic],” he compares emergency response to warfare, arguing that the goal is to win. Quoting from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” Gerald writes:
“He [Sun Tzu] thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.”
Gerald then analyzes the Gulf oil spill, stating that lack of intelligence contributed to BP and Unified Command’s inability to stop the spill. He also looks at the plane crash at the Austin IRS building and notes that people were using their cell phones to take pictures, text, Tweet, and post to Facebook to share information, and he notes “that information may be extremely valuable to response managers.”
He then notes two significant barriers to intelligence gathering that emergency managers must overcome:
- getting over the idea that only information generated from within the response is of value
- turning the massive flow of mostly meaningless data into something useful Read More>>
We agree with his conclusion:
With the increasing use of smartphones, pad computing and mobile computing in all forms, with the increasing deployment of smart sensors and the already massive network of observers available to help gather intelligence during an event the direction of the future of emergency management is clear. Certainly there are those, probably the vast majority, who will continue to operate as if this new world of information doesn’t exist. But, like the general who refuses to accept the information of his intelligence agents, it is only a matter of time before the battle is lost.
How do you think business intelligence will change emergency response? Do you know of any situations where business intelligence could have changed the action that was taken? Share your thoughts with us.
One of the biggest moves in the IT industry is toward cloud computing, a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services (such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service [IaaS], Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] and Software-as-a-Service [SaaS]) over the Internet. Can the IT governance of cloud computing be successfully outsourced?
In the article, “The Industry Speaks about Cloud, Part IV: Business Leaders Demand Business Transformation Support – Can Providers Gear-Up to Help?,” the thought leaders at Horses for Sources explore cloud computing, IT governance, and related expectations surrounding outsourcing.
They open the article with the statement: “Business leaders want to accelerate to Cloud and half of them expect to rely heavily on third party expertise to help them with governance, change management and business process transformation.” They have surveyed business leaders, and they found that the leaders expect to allocate 30% of their business budgets to cloud computing over the next five years.
The article continues by arguing that the shift to cloud computing is so radical, some companies may resist the change to the point of business failure. Cloud computing is so revolutionary that it will provide a shift in how organizations provide and pay for IT and business services. The article closes with the following statement:
“Business leaders are looking to transform many core businesses processes around Cloud, and show serious intent to make it happen—40% revealed to us how they want support transforming IT and business relationships, and want change management support to make the transformed organization effective. But the eye-opening finding is how critical business leaders view governance capability in achieving a Cloud operating end-state—over 50% of business respondents see governance as critical compared with only 36% of their IT counterparts .” Read More>>
So what are your thoughts on cloud computing? How do you think it will change IT governance? How are your businesses planning to accommodate this radical new paradigm shift? Share your thoughts and ideas on our blog.
Over the March 18th weekend, the 30th Annual CAI/ Easter Seals Volleyball Challenge was held at the University of Delaware. This fundraising event raised over $244,000 in team and corporate contributions! Additional funds are expected to continue to be donated over the next several weeks, with hopes of reaching the $300,000 event fundraising goal.
In addition, at the event opening ceremonies this past weekend Delaware Governor Jack Markell, U.S. Senator Tom Carper and U.S. Senator Chris Coons all recognized and thanked CAI for our leadership in the community as the title sponsor.
The event’s success is due in large part to the efforts that CAI and our Associates put in to this endeavor, and who supported our various fundraisers over the past six months. It is through these contributions that Easter Seals is able to help over 20,000 children and adults in our community who have disabilities live more independent lives. Thank you to everyone involved in this most worthy of causes!
Lately, we’ve been exploring issues related to outsourcing, particularly offshore outsourcing. In today’s economy, numbers talk loudly, and many companies are getting into analytics as a means to evaluate their productivity and viability.
But how are these companies getting their analytics? In the article, “Industry-Specific Analytics: Where Providers Can Differentiate or Disappoint,” the group Horses for Sources explores the importance of analytics as a business activity. They believe that “the capability to [sic] offer these analytical insights and [sic] thought smart governance models is quickly emerging as a major differentiator.”
They continue by arguing that analytics need to be both vertical and horizontal. In their words:
When you’re moving major components of your business and IT administration offshore, you need the capability to get rapid data on your global operations. You’d be amazed at the dearth of information many global firms have over the operations, their employees, their supply chain, their finances etc. Read More>>
However, it’s no longer about having quality “horizontal” analytics. That’s a given, today, as companies increasingly globalize their processes and business functions. Industry-specific analytics techniques are now rapidly evolving, while other, more industry-neutral “functional” analytics services are also gaining popularity due to unified business needs. Read More>>
The article makes the case that more and more companies are turning to offshore providers to get their analytics. It states:
The number of service providers offering analytics services from offshore locations has exponentially increased over the last 5 years. Furthermore, the number of companies with a desire to build an analytics practice will easily be double the number of players in the market today. Read More>>
What do you think about the trend to collect analytics from offshore sources? Given the political instability rampant in various parts of the world, is this a wise practice? Share your thoughts with us on our blog.
In an exploration of the question, “How do you treat employees during a merger with offshore partners?”, we discovered the chapter excerpt of a book by Tandy Gold called Key Lessons Learned in Offshore Outsourcing: Towards an Offshore Maturity Model, published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. The title of the excerpt was “Chapter 2: The Elephant in the Middle of the Room: The Ethical Fork in the Road”
Tandy Gold opens with a personal anecdote of how she discovered an unethical partnership in her company, and she had to courageously confront the board of directors about it. Far from being fired as she expected, the board appreciated her moxie and some internal jobs were saved.
After sharing her story, she recommends the development of an overt framework of ethics for completing any merger or strategic outsourcing arrangement and frequent communication of this framework to all stakeholders.
She closes with four guidelines for ethically treating impacted employees during an offshore partnership:
1) Recognize this is an adjustment resulting from the global marketplace – in essence, no one individual or set of individuals is “to blame.”
2) Understand that the visibility and level of impact requires a new focus on both ethics and communication of that ethics as a set of decision-making guidelines for offshore policy.
3) Plan on not only defining, but sharing, purely economic set of guidelines.
4) Describe the vision of the “to be” state in critical areas – especially defining and communicating the new set of highly valued employee skills that will guide the careers of employees moving forward. Read More>>
In these tough economic times, when more and more American jobs are impacted by less expensive offshore work, following this ethical framework ensures fair treatment of all involved. Feel free to share your thoughts on how ethics can play a part in offshore partnerships on our blog.
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