Interesting article on offshoring & oursourcing

[doodab]

And it's pretty damning.

The Boeing Debacle: Seven Lessons Every CEO Must Learn - Forbes

Another one here on maximising shareholder value & why it's actually a bad idea

The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value - Forbes

Which makes me wonder if the success of German manufacturing isn't perhaps partly due to the preponderance of family owned, family managed firms who aren't beholden to external investors.

[scooterscot]

And it's pretty damning.

Which makes me wonder if the success of German manufacturing isn't perhaps partly due to the preponderance of family owned, family managed firms who aren't beholden to external investors.

Their success is exactly because of this predominance. Not to mention US manufacturing chases cash, not quality. That attention to detail never really existed in the first place.

Outscoring is what happens when shareholders demand decisions that result in more profits, which is nothing to do with the wellbeing of the company or it's future. You put a CEO in charge whose bonuses are linked to stock market performance, and there you have it.

Outscoring is a symptom of the disease.

What's happening to the Royal mail shall be another accolade for the Tory hall of shame. Where the Germans protect and work for local private enterprises, we're determined to hawk our national institutions into the the control of hedge funds.

[bobspud]

The first article applies equally to to the rush to cloud computing. There are going to be a lot of sore arses when people realise how much its going to cost to change cloud providers as well as the increasing cost of cloud provision.

You are spot on.

I work in the cloud infrastructure space and I can happily say that the vast majority of anyone claiming to be in cloud are:

Deluding customers and themselves.
Miss-using the technology when that is only a very tiny proportion of the benefits
Not willing to undertake the true (not phoney) transformation of their business that will come from getting cloud right.

I had fully automated build and scale cracked back in 2006 I know how powerful it is. The vast majority of the companies that I have worked with since wont spend the time sorting out automation and provisioning so they can't get to the next stage and end up generally making an ass of themselves while crying about how crap cloud is...

Anyone that tell me they are outsourcing to save money doesn't understand their own company and the mess their IT systems are in. But clearing up the tulip is far too boring compared with calling it a transformation...

you can't transform what you cant understand and you don't start to plan for a transformation until the easy stuff is finished....

Simples.

[Paddy]

you can't transform what you cant understand and you don't start to plan for a transformation until the easy stuff is finished....

Simples.

Well said.

[bobspud]

Well said.

Getting the CxO to admit to that statement is harder than finding a hens wisdom tooth

I think its probably to do with a few problems.

1) Telling the rest of the board that they have let the IT estate go to tulip is a one way ticket out the trough...
2) Explaining that you should not embed business rules into the data doesn't mean anything to them so convincing them to spend a year splitting out the data from the rules is also hard to sell
3) Getting them to understand what a mess they are in is impossible until the worst happens.
4) Once the worst has happened they will want to concentrate on fixing the symptom not understanding the root cause.

IT is hard most people can't understand it.

I am starting to think I will never see a well run IT system...

[minestrone]

To be honest I don't want to see well run IT systems.

The more feck ups the more money that gets spent.

[sasguru]

Not to mention US manufacturing chases cash, not quality. That attention to detail never really existed in the first place..

You don't really believe that or you'd never get on an aeroplane. Do you insist on Airbus or you won't travel?

Outscoring is ...Outscoring is a symptom of the disease.
..

WTF is "outscoring"?

What's happening to the Royal mail shall be another accolade for the Tory hall of shame. Where the Germans protect and work for local private enterprises, we're determined to hawk our national institutions into the the control of hedge funds.

You mean like Deutsche Post, a privatised shareholders' company?

Yet more absolute bollux from our resident Village Idiot, Lord Haw Haw

[scooterscot]

You don't really believe that or you'd never get on an aeroplane. Do you insist on Airbus or you won't travel?

WTF has quality got to do with safety?

WTF is "outscoring"?

You dno't konw?

You mean like Deutsche Post, a privatised shareholders' company?

Yet more absolute bollux from our resident Village Idiot, Lord Haw Haw

Yes 7.5% of shares in private hands. Full on privatised that is.

You know if you keep occupying my thoughts with your drivel I may have to start charging you rent.

[doodab]

you can't transform what you cant understand

Very true. You can always **** it up some more though....

[tomtomagain]

"Cloud Computing" is potentially going to gut what remains IT departments and I think it is also going to have a dramatic effect on the current outsourcers such as Infosys, Wipro etc as they have a very linear business model ( get as many chargeable resources into a company for as long as possible ).


For example if a corporation implements a SaaS CRM package then they don't need any infrastructure people to feed & water the servers, don't need anyone to upgrade the software and they wont be running any substantial "development" projects on it ( so no PM's, developers and BA's ), IT Ops .... well they wont need those either because they are provided by the SaaS Vendor.

Change Management people? Well as they aren't running projects, they wont need any, and as they don't "own" the application then they don't have any say in changes anyway.

Integrating into another system? Well it's likely that the SaaS vendor will have already done that .... so no integration projects.


Of course there will still be roles .... security for example. Process mapping and I think training and "evangelism" will increase in importance.