Week 1 Managing Global Outsourcing

In my reflection for Mr. Higgins last module (Managing Design and Development) I decided that one of my future goals for Mr. Higgins module (Managing Global Outsourcing) was that I would post up my thoughts and notes on the weeks readings, as a platform for potential discussion. In the future I hope to have these blogs posted before class, however given the readjustment back into college life this blog reflects back on week 1.

In week 1 our readings were; 

Chapter 1 of The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring by Ilan Oshri, Julia Kotlarsky and Leslie P. Willcocks 

The first chapter of the book gave an introduction into some of the jargon used and interesting facts on the most common reasons for outsourcing and backsourcing.

What surprised me most was that 70% of companies outsource to reduce costs yet, 78% of companies backsource because of unclear value for money. That is a very clear contradiction, one possible reason for this is the very narrow outsourcing definition given in the book

"Outsourcing is defined as contracting with a thrid-party supplier for the management and completion of certain amount of work, for a specific length of time, cost and level of service"

This description says that outsourcing should be at a specific cost, yet clearly that is not true for 78% of companies.

Main Drivers of Outsourcing.
Source: The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring by Ilan Oshri, Julia Kotlarsky and Leslie P. Willcocks

Main Drivers for cutting back or bringing back outsourced services
Source: The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring by Ilan Oshri, Julia Kotlarsky and Leslie P. Willcocks

So I have proposed my initial definition of what I think outsourcing is;

"Outsourcing is contracting with a thrid-party supplier for the completion of certain activity, in order for cost saving or exploiting opportunities that cannot be accessed with current talent or resources".

I will review this at the end of the semester and see if I have changed my definition of the term outsourcing.

Harris, M. 2012. Outsourcing is so last year [Online]. Seattle: The Economist. Available: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/05/future-customer-support

The article talks about a race to the bottom in terms of technical support. India steam rolled ahead, followed by Philippines’s who’s western tone gave them a slight advantage, in terms of being a more suitable nearsourcing partner for the western world.  

As with these races to the bottom no one really wins, it's a zero sum game. However there is this new direction that is coined in the article called "unsourcing".

I had a few problems in terms of this "unsourcing" label. I don't think unsourcing is different to nearsourcing at best it's a different variation. The principles of both nearsourcing and unsourcing remain the same, a company is bringing previously outsourced activities nearer in terms of culture, language, norms etc. If we take the example of GiffGaff (used in the article) who actively encourages peer to peer issue resolving then it surely it can be seen as nearsourcing? Or maybe is it a new type of backsourcing?. 

Great Dane!

Below are a few pictures, when students from Aalborg in Denmark who are studying IT management, visited the Smurfit iBusiness - Innovation through ICT masters class. It was a great to talk to other students with similar interest and a lot of new experiences and ideas were exchanged between both sets of students. It was also a great experience to sit in on Gitte Tjørnehøj guest lecture on the topic "Claudio Ciborra's "Drift" to "managing drifting digital development". This added another prescriptive to our previous weeks discussion about the trade-off between creativity and control or planning and improvisation in this circumstance. 

Credit Tobias Lindgreen Sørensen for the photos. 

Tobias, Sophie and I

Aalborg students, Bruno, Darren, Hamsa and Ian, captivated by Allen's lecture. Sanket...not so much!

Niall and I rocking our presentation! :) Sanket is still not impressed!!

Peter wordily thinking that he'll have to buy Speedo's with pockets to store his Ucard if e-lockers are installed in the swimming pool. 

Allen presenting to the class. 

Allen presenting to the class.

Allen presenting to the class. he does it a lot, but he's good at it :)

Aalborg students at IBM. 

A lecture debrief meeting..........at Dicey's :P

[Assessment] End of Term Video.

HI ALLEN!

Niall and I have decide to focus are end of year term paper and related video on the current Ucard system used in University College Dublin. I talk for the first half of the video about the current system and how we used IDEO method cards to identify the problem in the current system. Niall then talks about the problem we identified and how we plan to solve it. Finally Niall justify's why we think our solution is feasible*. 

I hope you enjoy our video!

*Three days ago UCD announced a partnership with IBM to become the world's first smart universtiy, like a small smart city. This means that our proposed solution is far more feasible but in general it is great to see UCD engaging with the cutting edge of technology. The full article can be found HERE

[Observation] Open software licensing in the real world

Last week in class we discussed the topic of open source software in particular Linux. A interesting topic of discussion was about licensing and how free open software can avoid splintering. Licensing helps reduce the chance of the software splintering. Two licensing terms I became more similar with are GNU and FOSS.

GNU was launched by Richard Stallman, a software freedom activist (pretty cool right!). Here is a picture of Richard.

"Richard Stallman - Fête de l'Humanité 2014 - 010" by Thesupermat 

GNU stands for Gnu Not Unix, another clever play on words, as programmers love to do! Richard also pioneered Copyleft (Another Pun) which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify and distribute free software.

After last weeks (Week 10) class I wanted to check what open software was used by applications I use everyday, and more importantly was the redistribution of the software correctly licensed.  So I decided for my 'Quick and Dirty' experiment I would try and find the licensing for four applications I use most often on my mobile. These were WhatsApp, Snapchat, Dublin Bus and Spotify.

Results:
Snapchat:
I could not find the licensing section for Dublin Bus or WhatsApp, this is not to say the licensing section is absent from their application, I could just not find it.

Both Spotify's and Snapchat's licensing where under the settings tab.
I have attached a screenshot from Snapchat's licensing page, you will notice they have used a lot of Apache software.

Spotify:
In comparison to Spotify, the language is a lot more user friendly in terms of users who are unfamiliar with the licensing of open source software. This user friendly language makes this section of the application more accessible to all users. It would seem to me that whoever wrote this part of the application had read Thaler and Sunstein book NUDGE, As this friendlier language transforms this complex information into something people can understand. Also Spotify talks a lot more about GNU and FOSS, compared to Snapchat.

Conclusion and Further Research
I would love to hear of any other applications mobile or web-based where I should check out their licensing section. I also think it would be cool, next time you are on an application you use often, if you can find where the licensing is and what type of open software the application uses. I would also be interested in peoples opinion whether the licencing section should be in 'layman' and simple terms or the 'techy' language should be kept as only people interested in software would check the licencing section?

[Assignment] Teaser Trailer for End of Term Video

Thinking outside the box!

Niall and I wanted to create a bit of hype  around the end of term video submission for Managing Design and Development. So we analysed how large film markers created hype, they did this by revealing teaser trailers. This is what Niall and I have decided to do  for our submission.......Yes it's a good as it sounds. We are just going to leave it here. Enjoy!

[VIDEO] An internet without screens TED Talk - Tom Uglow.

Tom Uglow a Google creative lab designer gives an insightful TED talk about what a world might look like if we interacted with the internet with our natural and physical environments and not through screens. He makes some fantastic points about why screens are not a great design and argues that humans love natural things, and that natural things and the use of the internet can co-exist. He talks about design companies form around the world and how they are designing natural but simple tools for everyday life. You may also see in some of his slides, his use of 'quick and dirty' prototyping.

This talk reminded me of week 3, when we had to design a 'text free' interface and more recently last weeks discussion about the creative process in terms of Pixar. With this new knowledge I definitely think that my text free prototype from week 3 would look a lot different.

I would encourage you to take 8 minutes to procrastinate take a look at this talk.

[Case] Scrum Proposal

Case Study 

Please find the details of the case study HERE

Recommendations 

It's clear that new product development (NPD) and maintenance work are two different sides of the same coin for the company, however, each has their own life-cycle.

My recommendation for the company is to split the NPD and the maintenance team. Thinking about my recommendation I felt it would be hard to implement this in the company, however having read fellow classmates blog's; I think Hogan (Neal) Tran best surmises how my recommendation could be used in the real world.  That is that each customer is allocated a team, and the team and the customer progress together throughout the lifecycle.

It seems that the company hasn't expressed this to its employees or created a culture for it. Cheating a little bit and using this weeks paper about Pixar, one of their recommendations is to create an environment which facilities the nature of work the company wants to produce.

I don't think that the company should add another employee, rather the company should follow my recommendation above. 

Other considerations 

I don't think implementing scrum would impact their ISO9000.

They should employ scrum, as part of this I think daily stand up meetings are something the company should employ straight away.