The MGS Blog

Monday, February 14, 2011

Goals of the MGS blog

Our goals are to equip ourselves and anyone following with the tools to:
  • Describe typical organizational activities and products amenable to sourcing beyond the traditional boundaries of organizations. State the common modes of sourcing high-tech products and services.
  • Highlight, summarize and justify the advantages and disadvantages of different sourcing modes.
  • Relate historical trends in global sourcing to current topics and explain how local conditions have evolved. Illustrate the application of the various sourcing modes in example industries.
  • Illustrate the relationship between technology trends and the emergence of expanding arrays of options around sourcing of product components and services. Analyse global sourcing discourse and break them down to identify the interests involved.
  • Juxtapose the strategic decisions available to business between in-house and outsourced delivery. Propose remedial measures addressing organizational and technological issues relating to global sourcing. Suggest concepts and frameworks for interpreting and deciding sourcing cases.
  • Identify emerging trends in sourcing relationships that are likely to be important in the future and contrast them against the current situations. Extrapolate and justify the implications of changing sourcing arrangements on complex inter-organizational relationships.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

IBM virtual team in Belarus, China, India, Latvia and the U.S. to create JavaBeans (1997)

Source: The Edge: Work-Group Computing Report (archive at findarticles.com).

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February 18, 1997, Tuesday
IBM Goes On 24-Hour-A-Day Cycle To Speed Java Application Development LENGTH: 798 words DATELINE: SOMERS, NY   Highly Skilled Software Developers in Belarus, China, India, Latvia and the U.S. in Virtual Team to Create JavaBeans

It's 7 p.m. in Beijing. At China's renowned Tsinghua University, a team of highly skilled programmers are putting the finishing touches on software written in Java, the hot Internet programming technology. They will end the day by sending their work electronically to an IBM programming facility in Seattle for further development during the U.S. work day. This scenario will soon be repeated daily in Belarus, India, and Latvia, where some of the world's top programmers are involved in an IBM initiative to develop Java components, literally around the clock. IBM will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years to incorporate Java technology into its enterprise products. The goal is to help customers more effectively harness the power of the Internet and network computing to conduct electronic business. Twenty-four-hour-a-day virtual development teams tap the resources of top high-tech organizations in emerging markets to speed the development of JavaBeans(TM) for IBM's award-winning VisualAge(TM) application development environment. "Java holds the promise of applications that can be written once and run in any operating environment," said Steve Mills, general manager, IBM Software Solutions Division. "A seamless, networked computing environment, where even mission-critical applications can be moved around the organization, helps customers do business on the Web by increasing speed and efficiency." Around-the-Clock Development IBM is pioneering the innovative 24-hour-a-day development cycle of Java.


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