Trippin' in this Flat World...

Recently I had the privilege of observing how flat the world was in the European countries visiting six of them in a span of three months. So many of the things I saw and did every day were similar to the activities in Mumbai, India and particularly with young people. The girls all wore low cut jeans or mini-skirts and the boys wore trendy trousers to teeshirts. I can’t recall seeing any ethnic dressing (that was the objective of visiting these places). Another thing, which made the world seem flat, is that practically everyone spoke English. Yes even when I was in France :) Though my trip to Brussels was business focused, I was able to visit several historic sites in Rome, including Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Vatican Museum, the fast paced life in Milan, learning the history and collecting the remains of the Berlin Wall, and not to forget the center of the earth Greenwich Meridian Time and the Queens Palace in London. Years ago, while in school, I had just read about all these and many more in school and used to enjoy the scenic beauties only in movies.I feel that this Flat World experience has changed everything. I visited most of these places that I could have never dreamt of visiting 10 years ago. Wikipedia and Google, basically enlightened me about every place I went, and all the things I saw. What a marvelous invention for travelers! I know I’ll never have the time to really learn in-depth and discover these things, but a little exposure to them is extremely interesting none-the-less. Kudos technology and Web 2.0 ;)

Outsourcing my Job !!

First and foremost, sincere apologies for the delayed write-up. The recent recessions of 2008 took some toll on me, with changes in net access, job function, and yes to some extent the food crunch. In this survival of the fittest, I happened to grab some action-packed Euro 2008 (well Azzuri’s didn’t play their heart out), and some Wimbledon. I decided to take some break from the routine and went onto join Business forums in Brussels. Now that my audience is convinced (or not so convinced) with my excuse, I would start with where we left…outsourcing in the flat world.

The World is Flat provided mixed insights over the concept in context. On one hand, I found the history of the digital revolution very fascinating and one that would keep the target readers glued (the book had a forward-looking nature - I’ve always been a science fiction fan). At other times, I got a little tired of the repetitive nature of Friedman’s examples – here comes yet another story of how someone makes a lot of money; followed by another example of how the Chinese and the Indians are preparing to conquer the world. After analyzing at some of the criticisms leveled against it, I can see that there is some merit in them. The central point of Friedman’s book is that globalization is removing barriers to competition, and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator: cost.

So why outsource? The following points can be considered as factors that drive outsourcing (points in order of importance)
1. Reduce Costs
2. Gaining access to skilled IT resources that are not available within the company that decides to outsource.
3. Free up internal resources, so that they can focus on product marketing and strategy
4. Accelerate company transformation
5. Accelerate the project
6. Reduce time to market, so that the organization is always in the race to satisfy the customer. After all customer is the King.

Reference: http://shipsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/distributedteam.jpg

Like every coin, that has two sides, the concept of Outsourcing has its advantages and disadvantages too.

I have been in Europe for a few years now with a leading Telecom firm in Belgium, presenting regular sessions to clients and resolving issues with/of my users and my team. While working for a team in the Product Readiness department, I identified a fairly critical issue/ bug with one of our vendor’s application system and called it to their technical support team, and this experience reminded me of one of the chapters in the book (as well as of O’reilly’s experience, similar to the one I will be presenting). In the process of resolving the bug, I contacted the developer from Czech/Israel, and explained the problem. After some investigation from the offshore development team, I obtained typical responses like – Please analyze the scenario introduced, Can you shut down all the instances of your server, and restart the scenario again? None of these things worked, not did I expect them to work, and the developer on the other side of the world was left scratching his head with a typical answer – I will get back to you after I investigate and identify the problem, if any!

I have faith in my thinking, analytical and cognitive abilities more than anyone else. I question basic assumptions and its validity when and where required. With this notion, I decided to go ahead and give them a hand by resolving the issue which was delegated to a member of my team. I started debugging the problem area and pointed out actual line numbers in their source file so they could take a look. My colleague noted down everything I’d said for his reference, and pushed an urgent patch of the bug fix later that evening.

I believe what I described is a good illustration of interaction that’s probably becoming more and more typical in the Flat World. I recognized a similarity between the above experience and the software industry. The off shoring of software development and testing is real, but does that mean I am afraid that someday my job maybe outsourced by a third world nation, like Somalia or Afghanistan as well? Perhaps it will be. But by that time it may not be a bad thing because I would have ‘retooled’ my skills and acquired the knowledge necessary to compete and continue to add value to my professional pursuits.

Brad Silverberg, Microsoft’s Hero, once said, “The role of every Microsoft employee is to work them out of job.” What he meant was that we should find ways to eliminate fire drills and provide solutions so our jobs “just happened.” The world is in constant change, and with it we must constantly change. We must never rest on our laurels because the moment we do, the world will surely pass by us.

P.s: The experiences described in this chapter are more or less similar to the experiences shared in the web by some of the bloggers. Though the examples set and the words used might be different, the underlying concept remains the same.