- 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.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Goals of the MGS blog
Our goals are to equip ourselves and anyone following with the tools to:
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).
begin quotation...
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.
end quote.
begin quotation...
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.
end quote.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Some notes on the background of sourcing.
Henry Ford’s Model T was the emblem of modern manufacturing systems characterised by suppliers and integrators working together to create value.
Industrial production, contracting, subcontracting and contracting out have been defining features of modern organisational forms since the industrial revolution and perhaps prior.
Two main organisational forms have prevailed in the modern era:
Along the way it demonstrated the overcoming of geographical, spatial and temporal barriers to data exchange.
The modern global supply chain is an extreme case whereby a process’s implementation is facilitated by data exchange between a diverse array of firms thereby creating the very possibility of an integrated supply chain.
As an outsourcing destination Ireland has lost appeal throughout the last decade.
Rising costs and competition from developing countries has eroded many of the advantages that Ireland once held.
Consequently Ireland has itself become a net consumer of outsourcing services.
A driver of this trend is the steady erosion in competitiveness in Ireland at country level, a trend which has been in place since the mid-1990s.
The Irish Central bank quarterly bulletin January 2010 provides harmonised competitveness indicators (HCIs) for the Irish economy. Cost driven deterioration in Irish competitiveness has been partially compensated for by increases in productivity but only it appears by shifting lower cost lower value added activities and processes offshore.
The picture for IT outsourcing is however less clear as Irish based offices of multinationals move up the value chain.
Like all mature markets Irish firms and multinationals based in Ireland often outsource organisational function activities to local or international-based outsourcing providers; for example traditional areas like payroll, accounting, finance, legal, HR, purchasing, and logistics, but also such as marketing focused on SEO (search engine optimisation), web development, website hosting, IT services like e-mail and spam filtering, virtualised storage, and telephony services.
Core or primary value processes may also be outsourced but at a higher risk or for reasons other than cost reduction alone.
Whether providers of outsourced services based in Ireland themselves source their activities offshore or not is a matter for their own operations.
Claims for the size of Ireland destined outsourcing activities and Ireland generated outsourcing vary, range widely between 100s of millions and billions.
Helpdesk and international call centre operations is one area where firms still see value in Irish based operations, particularly where multilingual skills and addressing the European market are important requirements.
In 2003, the value of the outsourcing market in Ireland passed €209 million ($234 million).
Irish banks have outsourced considerable operational activities to third-party providers (e.g. Bank of Ireland's multi-year deal with HP followed by the switch to IBM).
The public sector in Ireland also has long experience with outsourcing services particularly IT (e.g. The Irish Revenue Commissioners and Accenture).
Regardless of the provisioning destination (whether onshore or offshore) the trend is for organisations to increase the investment in outsourcing projects.
Even so firms experience with the outsourcing phenomenon is mixed as expectations to deliver higher levels of service grow and priorities change from simple cost reduction towards valued added.
Regardless of the experience with individual projects outsourcing is likely to remain a popular option with over half CIOs in Irish firms having budgets cut in 2009, cost saving will remain a huge driver or outsourcing initiatives.
HP Video Podcast: Be "on the business" for strategic IT and outsourcing
Tim Hynes, IT Director Europe, Middle East & Africa, Microsoft
Industrial production, contracting, subcontracting and contracting out have been defining features of modern organisational forms since the industrial revolution and perhaps prior.
Two main organisational forms have prevailed in the modern era:
- Vertical integration, managing and owning the whole value chain process from procurement of raw materials through to production of end product.
- Horizontal specialisation, focusing on crafting/creating/delivering excellence at once core stage of the process of production before passing the processed good onto another stage.
- Fordist manufacturing created conditions for interfaces between different tasks, activity, input, output, or stages of transformation making up the manufacturing process.
- Japanese Kanban system is one extreme of layered specialisation from many small suppliers coming together under the umbrella of the main supplier/contractor/manufacturer in the manufacturing environment.
- Inter-firm information/data process specialisation was enabled by EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) standardisation initiatives from the 1970s through to the turn of the century, now continuing under the aegis of XML and newer standards.
Along the way it demonstrated the overcoming of geographical, spatial and temporal barriers to data exchange.
The modern global supply chain is an extreme case whereby a process’s implementation is facilitated by data exchange between a diverse array of firms thereby creating the very possibility of an integrated supply chain.
As an outsourcing destination Ireland has lost appeal throughout the last decade.
Rising costs and competition from developing countries has eroded many of the advantages that Ireland once held.
Consequently Ireland has itself become a net consumer of outsourcing services.
A driver of this trend is the steady erosion in competitiveness in Ireland at country level, a trend which has been in place since the mid-1990s.
The Irish Central bank quarterly bulletin January 2010 provides harmonised competitveness indicators (HCIs) for the Irish economy. Cost driven deterioration in Irish competitiveness has been partially compensated for by increases in productivity but only it appears by shifting lower cost lower value added activities and processes offshore.
The picture for IT outsourcing is however less clear as Irish based offices of multinationals move up the value chain.
Like all mature markets Irish firms and multinationals based in Ireland often outsource organisational function activities to local or international-based outsourcing providers; for example traditional areas like payroll, accounting, finance, legal, HR, purchasing, and logistics, but also such as marketing focused on SEO (search engine optimisation), web development, website hosting, IT services like e-mail and spam filtering, virtualised storage, and telephony services.
Core or primary value processes may also be outsourced but at a higher risk or for reasons other than cost reduction alone.
Whether providers of outsourced services based in Ireland themselves source their activities offshore or not is a matter for their own operations.
Claims for the size of Ireland destined outsourcing activities and Ireland generated outsourcing vary, range widely between 100s of millions and billions.
Helpdesk and international call centre operations is one area where firms still see value in Irish based operations, particularly where multilingual skills and addressing the European market are important requirements.
In 2003, the value of the outsourcing market in Ireland passed €209 million ($234 million).
Irish banks have outsourced considerable operational activities to third-party providers (e.g. Bank of Ireland's multi-year deal with HP followed by the switch to IBM).
The public sector in Ireland also has long experience with outsourcing services particularly IT (e.g. The Irish Revenue Commissioners and Accenture).
Regardless of the provisioning destination (whether onshore or offshore) the trend is for organisations to increase the investment in outsourcing projects.
Even so firms experience with the outsourcing phenomenon is mixed as expectations to deliver higher levels of service grow and priorities change from simple cost reduction towards valued added.
Regardless of the experience with individual projects outsourcing is likely to remain a popular option with over half CIOs in Irish firms having budgets cut in 2009, cost saving will remain a huge driver or outsourcing initiatives.
HP Video Podcast: Be "on the business" for strategic IT and outsourcing
Tim Hynes, IT Director Europe, Middle East & Africa, Microsoft
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