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Their article on extreme outsourcing got my undivided attention, since I am faced with a challenge similar to CIOs’, but from an outsourcing vendor perspective.
I would like to share the following story with you. We recently acquired a new client, a software company based in Palo Alto, CA. Instead of trying to get their entire business — which would have been the traditional “BPO” approach, we considered their engineering department as a supply chain, identifying the various processes and defining how/where they would be best handled. We ended up with the design team in Europe (not us), the production team in China (that’s us working with advanced techniques like Scrum, Ajax, Flex, etc.), and QA in Central America (not us). We helped define the overall communication system, based on Blogs, wikis, and more traditional tools. It might mean less upfront revenue for us, but I am betting that on the long run, we are creating a satisfied customer, thus an active reference.
In fact, to share some background, I am working for one of the largest Chinese outsourcing companies, leading their efforts in establishing a direct presence in the USA.
As we all know the first thing to do when entering a new market is to find a positioning that would help set the company apart from its competitors.
While we have been very successful over the years serving large corporations like HP, IBM, Honeywell, Sony, etc., I have to admit that we found very little in our track record that would make us truly different from the other vendors.
Hence our decision to develop a brand new commercial offer adapted to today’s US customer challenges and expectations.
A significant part of this offer consists of approaching IT differently, or as the article rightfully points out, as a supply chain where the assembly of various services enables to provide the best response to the end users’ needs.
I was so glad to see in reading this article that our approach was supported by an industry trend.
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