Monthly Archives: January 2014

Global IT Spending on the rise in 2014 – will Outsourcing inch up

Outsourcing is posed to get a boost with the global IT spending slated to rise in 2014 and further in 2015.

After few years of stagnant growth, Global spending on technology will rise 6.2 percent in U.S. dollars to US$2.22 trillion in 2014, helped by an improving economy and growing interest in areas such as mobility and cloud computing, according to new data from Forrester Research. If the prediction bears out, it will be an improvement: IT spending grew only 1.6 percent in U.S. dollars during 2013. Growth will quicken in 2015, rising 8.1 percent in U.S. dollars, but will remain “well below the double-digit growth rates of the late 1990s and 2000 times.

The U.S. dollar is expected to be weaker compared to many currencies next year, and IT spending will rise only 5.5 percent in local currencies, a percentage point less than previous projections, according to the full Forrester report. U.S. buyers are setting the pace, being responsible for 40 percent of all tech spending, while the nation’s economy has continued to grow. This is despite some political turmoil. But economies in Western Europe are only now beginning to recover while Brazil, China, India and Russia are going through a period of sluggish and uneven growth looking at big brother at times in US.

Software will account for the largest share of tech spending in 2014, at $568 billion, followed by IT outsourcing at $442 billion, IT consulting and integration services at $421 billion, computer equipment with $416 billion and communications equipment at $373 billion, according to Forrester’s report.

Software’s leading position is not a surprise, because it is the focal point for tech innovation today, whether that innovation takes the form of cloud computing and adoption of software-as-a service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS); smart computing and big data, real-time predictive analytics, and smart process apps; or mobile computing and mobile apps and enterprise app stores. IT consulting and outsourcing firms “ride behind software purchases,” helping customers implement and use it.

10 Stories That Shaped Tech Policy in 2013

See the link below, if you missed this story here it is…atleast two of them caught my attention hat will have a forbearing on Outsourcing.

1. Immigration reforms. This has been in a sort of stalemate for sometime now with no promise of anything happening anytime soon. Immigration reform into which this is bundled sort of took a backseat due to the President’s signature law “Obamacare” that hogged much of the limelight, the fact that it was rocky meant more time spent on bringing it back on rails while important topics like these took a backseat. if nothing gets done in 2014 due to lack of political will and consensus, this will most likely become a election issue and won’t see the light of its day till much later.

2. Cyber security
Not a single week passes without hearing some level of breach, we have seen some of the biggest heist of personal information besides financial information. All this will step up the trend to increase focus on cyber security

3. Mobile and social media
Unlocking of this sector and steady growth will mean some big dollars flowing into the outsourcing sector.

http://www.cio.com/article/745019/10_Stories_That_Shaped_Tech_Policy_in_2013?page=3&taxonomyId=3146

In the outsourced world, being puntual is a discipline

One thing that I noticed early on two decades ago when I moved to US was almost all the time everyone was punctual except a few, coming from India with outsourcing and usage of communications tools at its infancy I was a bit amused. There are of course stragglers always everywhere but nothing like what it is in few other countries where I worked more so India. We often joke about IST – Indian Staggered time instead of Indian standard time. Not trying to generalize or paint with a broader brush, I am trying to get the importance punctuality deserves and what it does to our stature.

I have myself been at the receiving end at times being late for reasons beyond my control and felt embarrassed.

The trouble with being punctual,” so goes the saying, “is that there’s no one there to appreciate it.” The beauty of it though I now realize is the benefit of gathering your thoughts, preparing for your meeting, taking advantage of the calm and be composed, attend to possible distractions before the meeting begins etc just to name a few.

Yet if you have a meeting with your boss, your team, a client, or a job interview, you know they’ll appreciate it. Still, it’s easy to fall afoul of the tyranny of the clock: between our endlessly distracted minds and distraction-rich devices, we can fall into a pit clicks and–and soon need to scurry out the door.

Here are a few ways to address them.

1) Do a dry run to check out

Don’t assume your meeting place just minutes away, but is it really? it helps to do “walkthrough” to find out just how long it’ll take to get from your office to your meeting point if it is outside of your comfort zone be it restaurant, adjacent building or couple of blocks away. punctuality is a form of graciousness.

2) Always allow for buffer time

It’ll take a moment (or eight) to unplug from your task at hand–you’ll have chat windows to close, auto responders to set, bathrooms to use. So allow for some buffer time.

3) Preparation is the key

Okay, so you might be able to get your physical body to the place on time, but will you have the preparation? Similar to doing your due diligence before hopping on a phone call, any professional meeting requires homework: what does this person do? Why are you meeting? What are the outcomes you’re looking for? And if you haven’t met them before, what does this person even look like?

If we don’t get that prep done before the meeting, we could be walking down the sidewalk (or, worse, driving) while looking up their vital stats on our phones–an extremely unproductive form of procrastination. So let’s avoid that.

Once you get to venue wherever that is , follow the rules for excellent meetings.

4) Beware of things that kill you at the last minute

If you have 15 minutes before a meeting, don’t dissolve yourself into a super absorbing task, those are much better suited to your work in the cave. Instead, do “shallow” work, like answering a few email or catching up your news.

5) Don’t expect smooth going always – expect the unexpected

I dread the last minute emergency calls, bad Traffic, dependencies on others, Trains get late, buses fail. So if you’re planning around everything going right, you’re getting yourself late.

6) Avoid ” just one More thing to do”

We’re all obsessed with productivity–sometimes it gets a little weird. And sometimes it makes us late.

7) Being early is good

If being early feels like a waste of time, you may have jerk-like time tendencies. Instead, come prepared for the pause: bring a book or something to work on. Or just closely observe the world around you–since that’s the foundation of creativity

How India pure play outsourcing firms are dealing with Millennials

Very interesting article from Business Standard. This is serving as a model to others to emulate. Outsourcing hubs are now waking to the realities of dealings with the aspirations of Millennials just when they though they had a handle on attrition.

India’s largest information technology (IT) services provider, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), will end this financial year with a staff count nearing 300,000. With a headcount of 290,713 at the end of the December quarter, it has one of the largest employee bases among private companies in India. It is well ahead of India’s largest state-run bank, State Bank of India, which had one of 222,106 at the end of the September 2013.

Globally, too, TCS has left behind much of the competition; for instance, Accenture has a global staff count of 281,000. It is still behind IBM, which has an employee base of 434,246.

However, for Ajoy Mukherjee, the executive vice-president and global head, human resources, at TCS, it is not the size of the employee base that is the prime concern. It is managing and meeting the aspirations of “Generation Y” (those born during the 1980s and early 1990s, also called millenials), who are 79 per cent of employees.

“When I joined the company in 1980, we were 450-500 people. With the size we have today, connecting with the aspiration of every employee is crucial,” he says. Some of it seems to be going well, as TCS has one of the lowest rates of staff attrition in the sector.

For the quarter ended December 31, this was 10.9 per cent; Infosys had 18.1 per cent.

Mukherjee said this will be important as in the next four to five years, the company will be ready to take on board far more of the the millennials. “We have taken several initiatives to connect with our employee base, such as creating a social media platform, holding town halls (meetings) so that they can connect with leaders, having group meetings as this will allow their seniors to understand the aspirations and have constant dialogue,” he added.

One change the company has seen as younger people walk in is the way they claim benefits. As part of the salary, TCS has something called a “bouquet of benefits”, where an employee can choose to claim or invest part of the allowances.

Earlier, the trend was that people would save money for the long term; now, more and more people want the maximum money in hand at the end of the month.

‘Knome’, the internal social network platform, has helped employees connect with each other. This is significant as several IT companies do not allow employees to access platforms such as Facebook or Twitter during work hours. This has been a crucial step for TCS.

In 2013, it did a survey on India’s younger generation, covering 17,500 high school students across 14 cities. The biggest finding was that this generation was a heavy user of smart devices and had a constant need to be online. This is impacting every aspect of their lives, such as how they communicate in their academic and social lives.

At TCS, Knome allows employees to connect by putting up issues for discussion, debate or by writing blogs. Set up around 18 months earlier, this is also a popular platform for the chiefs to connect. Since then, the chief executive, N Chandrasekaran, rather than sending emails to individual employees, has chosen to post his thoughts on this platform, ensuring it reaches out to the largest number.

There is also an effort to connect with the future employee. Through Campus Connect, students are made part of the TCS system even before they join; it also helps the company to spot talent much ahead of the placement season.

“We engage with them before they join us through their engineering lifecycle. They are part of our ecosystems through our portals, competitons, etc. They are already interacting with us much before they get selected by us. So, we have a pipeline of talent much before we recruit,” said Chandrasekaran in an earlier interview to Business Standard.

TCS is also the only one among the top four IT services company which has been a net hirer for this financial year.

In fact, it has raised its hiring target by another 5,000, taking the total addition to 55,000 for FY14.

“The addition reflects the company’s growth trajectory. Also, our utilisation has gone up to 84.3 per cent. Looking at the requirement we had in the pipeline, we had to add another 5,000,” said Mukherjee.

Around 43,000 of these are already in and another 6,000 are under training and will join in the fourth quarter in India. The rest will be lateral hires in this country and those taken abroad.

Tapping the young workforce

If you look at the outsourcing model you will certain find a very vast majority of the resources are from the millennial age. This is both a boon as well as a bane. There is a element of confusion with the hiring mangers, while some are perfectly fine with hiring the young talent others are skeptical about the ability of these millennials to be able to show the level of skills, enthusiasm and energy of more matured professionals.

Extracting the best our of the young force calls for multiple strategies while understanding how they operate more so in the world driven by advances in technology front while keeps changing almost every day. Unfortunately modern education still stops when people graduate from colleges or post graduate schools. Learning something new should be an annual exercise in every person’s life similar to a vacation. Absolutely, making it an annual exercise is a good idea, Good timing as we set new years goals! Making sure to include learning and development along with both mentoring and being mentored (as you can learn from both!) is a must to be able to tap into the younger generations energy

I thought it fit to share with you a great article published in Huff Post by Jennifer Kushell.

With the world changing as fast as it is – industries rising, evolving and crashing; technology leading to more efficient, effective ways of doing everything; globalization interconnecting us all; and a whole new generation emerging and entering the workforce – how do we best ensure young people are prepared for the world of work from here forward? Keep in mind that along with the jobs being phased out, countless more jobs don’t even exist yet.

In order to create employment for those who are graduating, it’s important for us to review a system that has become antiquated. Even more critical, however, is to note that our current models of education, career planning and job searching are not just in need of a facelift – we need a major paradigm shift in how we think about training our emerging workforce and the skills they need to have to be relevant, let alone have a chance at being wildly successful.

But we do not need to wait for this shift in order to start teaching the new rules of success every day, in every forum, and every possible platform and channel available to us. It can be done in simple conversations or formalized programs – everyone can play a role in training our young people; they are, after all, our kids, cousins, neighbors, friends, colleagues and employees. The bottom line is that we can all ensure this emerging generation is primed for success, and it’s in our best interest to do so. Our future depends on it.

The following 10 skills are most vital to young people entering the workforce:

Ambition
Ambition changes the opportunity outlooks for a young person dramatically. Employers are increasingly looking to hire for attitude and train for skill, so cultivating ambition and an eagerness to learn and do well are really Step 1 toward a solid future. Young people who are hungry, interested and engaged are infinitely more employable, and when they have a passion for achievement, there are no limits to what they can do. Rather than just hire warm bodies, companies would much rather choose people who show promise and a solid foundation.

Value
Understanding what it means to add value to a company or organization is a fundamental question that should be answered by anyone looking for work, along with appreciating why that’s an important question in the first place. Employment is an earned privilege, not a right – even with a fancy diploma in hand, there are no promises or guarantees. People are typically the biggest expense in any organization, and those who add most value have the best job security. Those who don’t usually don’t stay employed for very long. In a corporate world that is looking more than ever before at operating lean, it’s no longer possible to hide and not contribute to a company’s financial well-being.

Articulation
The vast majority of young people struggle with explaining what they want to do, what work-related activities interest them, what transferable skills they have, and which industries or positions might best suit them. As a result, when they set out to market themselves, or interview with potential employers, they offer little useful information, and instead rely on those doing the hiring to find the right fit and figure it out. Recruiters are not career counselors – selling oneself in the job market is the responsibility of the seeker! Relying on our institutions or parents to “place” young people in jobs is a practice fraught with problems, and enabling entitlement or minimizing the importance of self-sufficiency – or the fortitude to secure meaningful work – are only a few of the drawbacks. Teaching people to pitch themselves effectively early in their working lives enables them to find employment on their own over a lifetime.

Skills
The basis of any solid employment marketing campaign (job search) is the actual skill base a worker presents to potential employers. At the most fundamental level, soft skills like interpersonal communication, the ability to speak and write correctly and present ideas clearly, are the areas most often cited when employers discuss the downside of hiring young people. Dressing appropriately (highly subjective these days) is also considered a critical part of communication. So despite the constant “communication” through technology that has dominated young lives, they are at a massive disadvantage because in person those soft skills are not present.

Expertise
Besides being a good person to work with and around, bringing some substantive expertise to the table cannot be urged enough. It doesn’t matter what the topic, as long as it’s valuable in the marketplace (remember the “Adding Value” piece above?). Ideally, expertise is transferable to other applications and industries too – and it’s important to note that attending specialty schools and formal training programs are not the only ways to acquire expertise. It can and should be cultivated constantly, with young people maximizing every opportunity to read, learn, volunteer, train, practice or work.

Terminology
Every industry relies on its own lexicon of terminology to operate and communicate. Often these are technical concepts, processes or acronyms that sound foreign to people new to a field. Teaching young people to learn the language of a given workplace, industry or role is directly related to how smart they will sound and how well they will function in an environment, and dramatically improve their chance of securing jobs because companies will first choose someone who needs less time to be brought up to speed.

Curiosity
When young people are supported in pursuing fields that are of true interest, they are more likely to want to learn more and become well-versed in those areas. Intellectual curiosity leads to better educated and more informed workers, who can quickly cultivate themselves into real talent with a little help. The more inspired and motivated they are, and the more space they are given to explore, create and innovate, the more their potential becomes unlimited. This is an important consideration given that school curriculum often focus on a core set of skills, and other programs such as art, music or other non-academics are eliminated.

Context
The concept of context is a vital one to address with young people, from 4 key perspectives:

1) The working world operates by a different set of rules than most homes and schools. Training young people to acclimate to the adult world of work requires a dramatic shift in routines and expectations from a lifetime of studying and attending classes.

2) Different workplaces have different expectations about dress, attendance, communication, metrics for success and even use of personal technologies. Expectations that aren’t clearly understood are difficult to meet and that sets everyone up for failure.

3) It is a big problem that most young graduates don’t understand how business fundamentally works and is organized. For example, what is the difference between marketing and sales, or operations? What signs would signal that a company or industry is hiring, or worth studying or pursuing jobs in? How does one company fare in a market of other competitors (who happen to be other potential employers too)? What do industries look like?

4) How do we all fit into the bigger context of the world economy as global citizens? With a billion young people entering the workforce, there’s a lot of competition, but also plenty of untapped opportunity.

All of these conversations, if nothing else, break young people from the idea that they’re the center of the universe. Or, conversely, that their world is small, restricted and their options are limited.

Experience
Students, unemployed people and those in jobs they hate are all missing opportunities to improve their circumstances and marketability by building experience, which can be acquired in countless ways. In many cases, they can do so simply by volunteering time to local organizations, businesses, campaigns and community events. The more relevant to the skills or the industries someone wants to use at work, the better. With countless organizations struggling to survive and grow, but desperate for help they cannot afford, volunteering or interning can be the perfect opportunity for people to gain practical experience and connections, and to seed future opportunities. Even if the opportunities are unpaid, by staying active and engaged makes the unemployed infinitely more marketable.

Resourcefulness
Teaching young people to be solution-driven (rather than easily deterred by failure) makes them more valuable, competitive and self-sufficient. When people are resourceful, they will always entertain new ideas, approaches and possibilities. Entrepreneurship education and experience is an excellent way to drive this home and make young people more resourceful, as are hackathons, leadership activities and organizations. Cultivating resourcefulness as a skill prepares young people for jobs that may not yet exist; in fact, the more resourceful they are, the more likely the next generation will be to create their own jobs – and companies that will create jobs for others.

Dealing with Crisis

Crisis and outsourcing almost go together. More so when you are in infant stages of the relationship. Both sides needs to be understanding of the situation in the greater interest of keeping live the relationship and the business together without disturbance and loss be it financial or otherwise.

It is best to use the time tested method of managing crisis. see below.

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Technology Trends for 2014 – Opportunities on outsourcing

Technology made great progress with social media, cloud, new innovations etc leading the growth. A good measure of this is translating into more jobs into outsourcing hubs. Cloud for example will fuel rapid acceleration of using outsourcing hubs for housing data centers and resources that go with it. Social media still has a lot of steam to forge ahead.

Technology, like time, marches on. Amid all the retrospectives of the year gone by, it’s prudent to set our sights forward and prepare for the trends that will shape the channel in 2014. Last year was all about mobility, the maturation of Big Data, the emergence of gamification and the terror of advanced persistent threats.

While those technologies will continue to make their presence felt, for 2014 there’s a new set of tech trends on the radar. Here’s what is shaking up the channel in the year ahead.

BYOS makes a name for itself

BYOD, or bring-your-own-device, is so last year. The hot buzz-acronym for 2014 stands for bring-your-own-security. The BYOS trend is shaping up in response to the almost-daily revelations of U.S. government snooping in the cloud, coupled with the general uneasiness about security in cloud computing. Expect to see a host of new managements systems filling the desire of organizations to control their own data security and encryption rather than leaving the keys in the hands of the cloud hosts.

Cloud service providers take over IT

Despite what you may have read, there will be plenty of servers, networking components and storage gear sold next year. Unfortunately for the IT vendors, most of it will be acquired by thrift-seeking cloud service providers, forcing a shift in the major manufacturers’ mindset to a “cloud-first” world. According to IDC, about one third of all server shipments next year will go to cloud data centers, a number that’s due to rise to 43 percent by 2017.

Big Data attracts big money

A spate of cloud-based platforms capable of streaming Big Data in real time is set to push investments up somewhere around 30 percent to an all-time high of $14 billion in 2014, according to IDC. The ease of the cloud and a growing hunger for analysis of externally-sourced data and applications will fuel an exponential increase in the number of data brokers and a tripling in spending on specialized Big Data analytics services. The segments only moderating force will be a dearth of skilled and certified personnel to run it all.

3D printing takes shape

It’s been the ultimate nascent technology for going on two years now, but a few things are heating up the 3D printing market, most notably bioprinting, the amazing if controversial ability to produce functioning organs and tissues in something that looks like a tricked-out toaster over. It may take years to sort out the medical and ethical ramifications of bioprinting, but the buzz around it has the manufacturing industry taking a hard look at additive printing technology for rapid prototyping and bespoke modeling. Time to amp up your chops on print beds, powder rollers and extruders.

Biometrics gain ground on passwords

Solution providers should expect to answer a lot more questions about fingerprint readers, retina scanners, facial recognition software and other biometrics tools that are poised to disrupt the way all users gain access to their accounts and data. Let’s face it, the day of the text string as the ultimate IT safeguard are over. Most any password made up of string of characters can be broken in minutes. And managing the increasingly complex passwords needed for the growing number of devices and accounts in the modern user’s life is unsustainably onerous. Expect to see demand for advanced authentication techniques, first at large organization, and then filtering down to SMBs.

Smart machines join hands, take over the world

It’s hard to say which dry, unfortunate name is less appealing from a marketing perspective: machine-to-machine (M2M) technology or the Internet of Things. Neither inspires much awe, quite honestly. But even while bland monikers may have kept connected devices and machine-language analysis out of the mainstream consciousness, the capabilities this space is enabling are formidable. Expect to see new partnerships with IT vendors and service providers to address a market that’s predicted to climb north of $8.9 trillion over the next five years with somewhere between 15 billion and 30 billion connected things churning out data that will need to be captured, stored, processed and analyzed.

Smart stuff shows up everywhere

Embedded systems are getting a jumpstart from the same kinds of technologies that have made smartphones ubiquitous in modern life. Small, touch-enable gadgetry and tiny, robust sensors are finding their way into all manner of devices and are poised to disrupt the ways users manage their homes and office building, drive their cars and manage their transportation fleets, and connect with their families, friends and clients. Cheaper, smaller and faster embedded technology is so good today, that it’s finally making wearable computing a reality after years of false starts. By the end of 2014, Google Glass, Nike Fuel and Samsung’s GlaxayGear will be but a few of many devices designed to attach to the user and leverage the power of embedded technology.

It’s all about the apps

We all know it’s a mobile first world now. Will anyone be surprised when 70 percent of all information work done in the enterprise will be accomplished on a mobile device by the end of next year? But the heady rise in mobility has done more than simply put a premium on mobile device management. It has plowed up fertile ground for an app-based world, where almost every task will be accomplished through a specialized mobile application. The app market is expected to reach $38 billion in two years, in part because of the growing need for proprietary applications to support business functions.

Social gets useful

Nobody hates cat videos and brunch pics more than us. The promise of social media to fuel the social enterprise has been mired in a lot of wasteful activity and negligible results for several years. But 2014 promises to be social technology’s breakout year for business, with social sharing aspects finding their way under the hood of a number of enterprise applications as well as establishing itself firmly as a strategic part of most all customer engagement and marketing efforts. It’s just smart business. Over the next three years, more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have an active customer community, up from 30% today, according to IDC. And where is all that social information going? Right back into the enterprise’s product and service development efforts. Social technology deserves props in 2014

Improving utilization of your offshore team members

Here are some random but great ideas to explore

Involve them in training, have them create case studies for the work they have done as of now and come up with nice problem statements and solutions we as a company provided, Involve them in a well defined training is a good way but they are not utilized in this process. Another way to associate them with the people (may be senior or colleague) who are tasked and see their learning and contribution. More contribution from them will measure their utilization as well.

Have an application knowledge matrix, team members having bandwidth can plan training and build their knowledge on the areas they need to improve on. Additionally, team members having flair for conducting training, volunteer for technical training within the organization. The team members can also contribute to process improvement/ innovation initiatives.

Ensure that they only have minimal allocation to your project and utilize them for interactions with Internal Quality Audits, Status report preparations for Senior Management and Client, Data gathering and analysis for checking the profitability of the project. Also , keep them trained so that attritions are taken care of if any of your team members leave.

Have a plan before hand, of when the team members or employees are going to be task less, give heads up of what to do when all the tasks or activities are completed. during such times, he/she can ask each member to come up with any innovative ideas to build tools or infrastructure for both dev/test or any new ideas that help the product to enhance and evolve, ideas for process improvements, engaging with seniors on other projects to help them gain some more exposure and momentum in working with seniors and upper management, so that they can contribute to other projects/teams…

Here are few more ideas(in chronological order) of approach:

1. Involve them in innovation, invite ideas plant them to a storyboard & build it (nonetheless this will not be cost effective but am sure can be a good product which organization or market might need). Look towards automation of projects which these resources can contribute, this can be a value add to your customer which you might be able to sell (holds valid for product too).
2. Ask the resources to build some training materials, prepare & publish white papers
3. Train them in cross language & ask them to build the Train them in cross language & ask them to build the learning’s.

Typically use them for the following based on their skills 1 internal initiatives like quality, data analysis, identify root causes and suggest improvement for operational issues like permanent fixes so it is a future investment to reduce effort in the future 2. Use them to showcase their skills and develop business opportunities like PoC, white papers, case studies. 3. Share efforts with other teams which have a temp spike in effort 4. Ensure they get trained on skills required in the long run so their utilization improves over time Posted: 14 days ago

Involve them in POCs or risk mitigation plans. Thus they will indirectly add to the revenue of the project. Irrespective of no stipulated task hours, Utilization rate is rather based on number of billable hours divided by number of hours recorded in a particular time period. So, when not recording a billable time, utilization rate will be to the maximum extent.

There are variety of ways. You can assign some trainings to them and thus their hours would go to training budgets rather than to project budget. You can partially allocate these resources for documentation etc to other projects.

Typically use them for the following based on their skills 1 internal initiatives like quality, data analysis, identify root causes and suggest improvement for operational issues like permanent fixes so it is a future investment to reduce effort in the future 2. Use them to showcase their skills and develop business opportunities like PoC, white papers, case studies. 3. Share efforts with other teams which have a temp spike in effort 4. Ensure they get trained on skills required in the long run so their utilization improves over time.