"Performance of the virtual teams within the portfolio companies has not gone unnoticed, as potential partners to the these virtual team portfolio companies have marveled at the work. When presenting results of proof of concept studies to a potential partner, the CEO of a potential partnering company noted “It would take three times as many people and twice as long to achieve these results in my organization”."What tools, or technological infrastructure enable high performance virtual teams? One way of anticipating or evaluating these tools ahead of their potential adoption in mainstream IT enabled organisations is to assess their development and uptake within the emblematic knowledge intense virtualised digital media production industry, software engineering. The provision of technologies by software developers to support distributed software development has ended up having wider application in mainstream industries. For example source code control systems have been adapted for general versioned document control. The 'comment' feature for source code commits percolated into web pages and Blogs and has ultimately defined the basic functionality of microblogging services like Twitter. Wiki's comprise an entire subculture of the editable web and gave the impetus for the Through The Web (TTW) editing function in all other Content Management Systems (CMSs). SMS originated as an engineered test application on early GSM phones. Feature applications like conversational technology and email, in use since the dawn of the internet, are now general services for wider populations.
"a quarter of businesses believe the biggest bar to developing future IT leaders is “too few opportunities to gain experience due to outsourcing to other economies”. A larger proportion, 27 per cent, said outsourcing to other economies needs to be tackled to address the skills gap, while a third say it's the university courses that need to change to plug that gap."yet...
"17 per cent of university-leavers were unable to find jobs in 2011. This is a market in which the demand for qualified IT staff has increased by 23 per cent since 2010, and bosses at 59 per cent of ICT-dependent businesses said their firms are experiencing an IT skills shortage."Why?
"...57 per cent of companies complained of a shortfall in technical abilities, while 26 per cent said it’s business skills that jobseekers are lacking. Executives are struggling to fill the following roles: enterprise architects, product-specific jobs, solutions architects, application development and security."
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| (humour): Impact of BPO |
"Crowdsourcing isn't a single strategy. It's an umbrella term for a highly varied group of approaches that share one obvious attribute in common: they all depend on some contribution from the crowd."...
"A community that forms around a shared interest, shared passion, hobby, craft"
"When a company takes something that was once performed by employees and outsources in the form of an open call to a large group of undefined group of people, generally using the internet"
"Crowdsourcing is Wikipedia with 'everything'"
“Sourcing is the act through which work is contracted or delegated to an external or internal entity that could be physically located anywhere. Sourcing encompasses various in-sourcing and outsourcing arrangements such as offshore outsourcing, captive offshoring, nearshoring and onshorning.” (Oshri et. al, 2009)In light of the prominence and pervasiveness of inter-firm sourcing what are the advantages and disadvantages of different sourcing modes and how are they justified and applied in historical and contemporary settings? The current situation is never completely estranged from its historical contexts. Historical trends in global sourcing lead in to current topics and help to explain how local conditions have evolved.