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.

Working with India based resources – quick Dos and Donts

DOs :
Introduce yourself by your full name and title. Informality is not respected.
Welcome any invitation to engage in social interaction outside of work.
Learn to pronounce names correctly – even if it means a lot of practice.

DONTs:
Do not complain about or put down your organization or your home country.
If you are not proud of them, why should they be doing business with you?
Do not try to be humble by omitting earned degrees or titles. They are highly respected and carry a great deal of weight.

Dealing with skillsets that don’t match your need

The beauty of outsourcing is getting the skills you want temporarily so you are not saddled with those skill set that you don’t need permanently. This has helped save on precious IT budgets.

Not infrequently, you will need those skill sets that even your vendor cannot find right away. You will come across an outsourced vendor selling you skills that don’t match with your requirements. This happens more so in cases where the position has been open for quite sometime or where skill sets are not available with the vendor forcing him to resort to give alternatives. Most often they come with some kind of assurance that this will work or at times padded up so show some experience.

Example if you ask for a Adobe CQ a vendor could offer flex resources saying that they can pick it up easily and not to be concerned. similarly for .NET trained resources you could get Java instead saying they will pick it up in few weeks. Who is paying for this training – consider that, also how this is going to impact your efficiency and deadlines.

Some common technologies are fairly available in the market so there is no need to compromise on taking those that are not closer to it. Rarely you will find skill sets that are impossible to find given that most of the resources from outsourced vendors are in the average age group of 25 to 30 years and some of the skills are much older than that.

Assess the opportunity costs while making decisions. Not just money is at stake here, there are deadlines and quality issues to be looked into as well.

In large outsourcing arrangements when you change the underlying technology on a large-scale there is reason to persist with those that can adapt if they have significant business knowledge and have a fair compromise to leverage their SME skills and less of technical skills while they pick up. Also the technology has to be similar not entirely different to bridge and be able to adapt quickly. Also some level of training paid for the vendor is extremely helpful as well. Verify what kind of training is being offered, the depth and length of the training and how that would be helpful to the job on hand.

Building the next gen of Talent with Millennials – Part II

There are an estimated 80 million young Americans who belong to the so-called millennial generation, roughly ages 18 to 35. By next year, they are expected to comprise 36% of the U.S. workforce, and by 2020, Millennials will be nearly half of all workers. They are very diverse, upwardly mobile and multi talented. They change jobs sometimes faster than their resume can keep up. This leaves a piquant situation for employers who get frustrated with losing talent, dealing with hiring costs and not to mention disruption to their day-to-day operations.

There are multiple ways to deal with Millennials and gain their loyalty and help decrease your attrition levels. There is absolute need to explain your company’s vision and mission. Helping them understand their role in a larger picture gives them a clearer sense of purpose.

Given them the freedom to freelance on their pet projects is another avenue its okay to use your companys resources and time and material to help satisfy their desire for social endeavors. They care about society in general. My own examples from my team members range from participating going green program, helping local schools, feeding the poor and needy, building homes alongside Habitat for Humanity are just a few examples. The new wave of silicon valley firms have caught this much early. Companies like Yahoo, Google, Linked in have had success offering employees time to work on a project of their choosing, helping them feel more engaged and in control and also boosting innovation within the company. “This allows young employees to take initiative, be creative and produce something on their own.”

Be flexible with them, they like being on their own independent but are sincere so it okay to relax a bit and go their way be it to work from home or remotely or taking vacation or early time off. They often make up for that time lost in other ways.

A comprehensive study by the Pew Research Center in 2010 found that Millennials place a higher priority on helping people in need (21%) than having a high-paying career (15%). they care about.” According to a 2012 survey by staffing agency Adecco 68% of recent graduates identified good opportunities for growth and development as one of their top professional priorities. Assigning stretch projects, bringing in speakers or sending employees to leadership conferences will be especially helpful for those millennial workers interested in learning and growing their skills.

Encourage them regularly, say thank you, take them for lunch, coffee breaks and see the difference it creates in them to feel motivated and the efficiency levels goes up. They feel bored quickly, they don’t like doing the same thing again – I tell them to automate, transition to other members of the team or outsource if they don’t want to do the same things again and again

Building the next gen of Talent with Millennials – Series 1

MILLENNIALS : a person born in the 1980’s or 1990’s. Milennials and outsourcing go together. They are in majority in any outsourcing set up. Vendors hire hundreds of recruits right out of college every year both to meet their needs and to offset some of the costs of hiring more experienced resources in a cut throat competitive market. This makes it extremely important to know the great divide and bridge the gap to gain efficiencies.

Millennials have different expectations around the pacing and timing of their development. A study conducted recently showed that millennials are ambitious and seek abundant opportunities for development – particularly, opportunities to improve their current skills, learn new skills, and move into new roles. Boring is bad…keep them on their toes by assigning challenging projects where they can make a meaningful contribution.
They appreciate guidance and love feedback.

According to research conducted by Booz & Co., millennials are more willing to defer to authority than either Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers…millennials to look up to you and learn from you. Give them structure and set expectations with them early. Millennials also want feedback – and lots of it, both positive and constructive. Are you investing enough time teaching and coaching the millennials on your team? Its worth thinking, they want to improve and not just execute what you tell them to.

They value work-life balance. To millennials, work-life balance isn’t a perk associated with tenure; rather, it’s how reasonable business should be run given the technology available today. If appropriate, offer flexible schedules so that millennials can strike a work-life balance without fear of damaging their careers. Every year, millennials join the workforce in increasing numbers through various entry-level university programs and move up the ladder. Understanding how their priorities differ from those of the previous generations is critically important in engaging and developing this generation.

In the coming days I will blog more on this imporant topic – happy reading

Legacy skill needs – No problem your outsourced provider has it

One of the beauty of outsourcing is the ability to find skillsets that you may not have on your rolls. I have had several examples trying to find a rare or legacy skill set and the outsourced vendor would find some one either on my own account or outside with other clients that the vendor services and saved my day on the client site.

If you have a lot of legacy apps still in production but you are not upgrading it pending retirement this scenario almost happens now and then when you need a particular skill set when something fails or you need to upgrade a portion of the application. At times the requirements do not permit you to have a full-time employee waiting for things to happen.

The best practice would be have an inventory of skill sets you need based on the applications in production so you wont be caught off guard. Also check with the vendor what kind of broad skill sets they support. Most of them have personnel mapping systems that hold this data. Have a aready inventory both onsite and offshore to look up when you need.

This wont solve all of your skill sets issues, given the average young age group of resources that come out of the outsourcing pool, some skill sets like mainframe or older program and assembly language for example are tough ones to source. Some resources even if they learnt these skill sets wont list them for the fear of being slotted as legacy programmers than cutting edge ones working on latest technologies.

We all know legacy skill sets will die sooner or later and there is very little incentive to work on them.