Offshore outsourcing satisfaction drops

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yes, good point

IT and business management is NOT a match made in heaven, as many business people assume. The fact of the matter is, upper level managers are closer to owners and CEO's, and being IT-challenged in most cases, they assume IT fits into their model of cutting jobs and costs, when they simply never stopped to think about how completely dependent they are on a whole range of very knowledgable talent they had in-house. CEO's like to hear that! When they let the talent go, they are left holding the bag, as they say, so its cover-my-arse time. Thats what we are seeing now...

The second point is the crux of the whole issue here....as its what everyone is talking about in business this year in 2005...."move all your IT people into business processes". Wow, what a mistake! The problem is very simple...IT and busisiness are two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PRACTICES that still require years of experience to attain greatness in! You can pretend they are separate practices that require constant training and attention, but they do. I cannot tell you how many managers Ive seen who were former IT software guys. After they got promoted, they completely lost touch with newer technologies and newer technology problems that their former software guys were working through everyday. When they proposed projects, they are almost always underbudgeted, misunderstood, erroneous, and all based on the loss of knowledge in IT when they moved into the completely alien business practice unit.

The type of people it takes to form this "IT/business" hybrid" where both strengths are maintained constantly for the benefit of the company (ie, the CIO) is very very rare. Most people remain great at one, and mediocre at the other, no matter how you slice-and-dice it!

The only way institutions in the West will solve the educational and business challenge of generating business IT people is to beef up people in both practices and assign top managerial experts in each that cross-pollinate. Thats what we have evolved to in the company Im with, and its much better. Software managers and directors know what software people need and implementation managers and business process guys know what IT challenged business people need. In this world of increasing IT adoption and complexity, its ABSOLUTELY insane for any business to undermine and "compress" their IT staff to nothing or an offshoring model in the face of an increasing need for IT specialization and IT professionalism in wake of the volumes of newer and more challenging and more dependent technologies that are being built everyday by companies that are popping up all over the globe.

Once we had web designers and developers. Then a call was made for the hybrid developer/designer/database/network engineer in 2002. Some people in the face of layoffs after dot-bomb struggled to be these one-man-armies, but some expertise was lost. Thats now died on the vine and our shop is back to letting designers do what they do best and learn the new tools they need, and developers build the powerful backends that are evolving. Whats old is new again! Technology today is trending that way, not the other, despite what allot of research groups are predicting. Those groups that sell this research crap online are just a bunch of old people who have no real technology training or real experience in the IT work people like myself work and live in everyday that support hundreds of business clients we now server using our IT expertise.

We need more young, IT-exposed, intelligent computer/IT people, not business/computer people and research groups, if the US wants to survive in IT. Thats why India and China are doing so well....its about the young people and supporting their needs and goals in IT. Not the older managerial groups that infest our business climate in this country.

Let's let IT and business do what each group does best, and be great at one practice....not mediocre at both. Doesnt make sense to me! Management will learn....painfully the next few years. - MS

Posted by: wildranger   Posted on: 06/09/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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