Book Review: Offshore Ready: Strategies To Plan& Profit From Offshore IT-Enabled Services- Stuart Morstead and Greg Blount

chillibreeze writer — Dr. Roopa Nishi Viswanathan

Wow! So incredibly descriptive and informative! That’s exactly what comes to mind first, once you put down this exhaustive guide to outsourcing IT-enabled services. It is worth taking your own time to read this book (You wouldn’t want to miss anything once you begin) that takes you into an eye-opening journey into the “offsourcing”(a new word introduced by the authors to refer to the offshore outsourcing of IT-enabled services) world.

Is this book for you?

Even though the book is meant for those thinking of outsourcing IT-enabled services, anyone planning an offshoring initiative can benefit from the authors’ practical experience and understanding of both technical and market complexities. Every page is a testimony to the amount of expertise the authors hold in this field. This expertise has been effectively translated into pages and pages of lucid and comprehensive information for the reader. If you are one of those who hate to grapple with highly technical terms, there is no need to panic. Nothing here is complex because this book has been written with a wide audience in mind, as the authors mention at the outset. Whether you are a CEO, a CFO, an operational manager or an IT professional, you are sure to benefit from this book, which many readers would rate as one of the best books in this area.

India as a major offshoring destination

“What began as a ripple of activity with Texas Instruments, GE, Microsoft and others is becoming the accepted way to achieve cost savings as high as 60 per cent. This ripple of interest is poised to become a tidal wave of activity,” according to the authors, Stuart Morstead and Greg Blount. The authors are co-founders of the ISANI Group (www.isanigroup.com), an offshore services enabler and hence have the right kind of experience to suggest winning strategies to those intending to enter this field. The book mentions at the very beginning that it lays profound focus on India as a destination of offsourcing. This is a reflection of the authors’ belief that at present and in general, India provides the most attractive offshore environment across many areas of the IT-enabled services value chain.

Nevertheless, India has strong competition from other developing countries, in particular the Philippines that has very efficient providers, good infrastructure and is possibly a better match for some clients. Parts II through V of the book concentrate on India and most of the issues discussed relate to the Indian destinations for outsourcing. Those looking at other locations too will not be disappointed here. The book does offer a lot of statistics and figures pertaining to countries such as Russia, China, Ireland, and Mexico, comparing these with India, ultimately providing a realistic picture of the current scenario of outsourcing.

The book is divided into seven sections, each of which has a few chapters dealing with the topic, at the end of which one gets a chapter summary. The summary, divided into theme, key points, take-away and questions, is highly useful and can be used as a reference later on. The book has an online companion at www.offshoreready.com.

If you are "offshore ready" then you might want to contact Chillibreeze for your content needs.

Part I: An Overview of Offsourcing

This part as the name conveys, goes over outsourcing benefits and risks, the general approach, some critical success factors, an overview of the major vendors in the space and gives the reader an understanding of the variety of outsourcing solutions available to him.

Part II: Planning and Preparing for Success

If you started reading this part, it would mean that you have sustained interest in this area. Hence this part gives you a general idea of how you would begin the whole process in your company.

Part III: Executing the Plan

This part is a realistic perspective on the challenges one may face in the path of outsourcing and how to deal with each of them.

Part IV: Maintaining and Renewing your Offshore Initiatives

This is all about your relationship with your vendor, how to sustain a mature and stable relationship with an offshore partner and thus expand the benefits available to your organization.

Part V: Offsourcing Case Studies

This section describes three real-life examples of outsourcing environments. The areas stressed upon are vendor selection, project launch, change management issues, process development and critical success factors.

Part VI: Offsourcing Summary

You have reached this part and probably have a good idea of how to proceed in your venture. Not only does this part summarize the book’s key points but also undertakes the task of putting outsourcing into a broader strategic perspective.

Part VII: Appendices

The authors describe this section as a parking lot. It includes information that would not fit into the book per say, but is useful to the reader all the same.

“Offshore IT-enabled services are now within the reach of all large, most middle-market and even some smaller companies,” the book says, the key reasons being the infrastructure changes, the quality of services providers and the ever-increasing intellectual capital in offshore destinations. There are multiple direct benefits of outsourcing other than cost cutback including high quality, shortened time-to-market, productivity improvements and sometimes even improved service. Indirect benefits comprise possible increase in investment into other activities such as R&D or sales, and better focus on key strategic and core business issues.

Challenges are part and parcel of the outsourcing process and can arise in the form of intellectual property management issues, political instability, cultural maladjustments, and inconsistencies. As for the host organization, it has to deal with the perpetual issues of poor employee morale, resistance from the management due to seeming conflicts of interest, lesser control over the project, lack of reliability in the vendor’s infrastructure and sometimes decreased efficiency due to the same. Outsourcing offshore can also bring up delicate ethical issues such as loyalty to local labour forces. But the authors argue that more and more companies are demonstrating that opting for comparative economic advantage leads ultimately to a win-win situation.

Look before you outsource

According to the book, critical success factors for offsourcing are knowledge building, clear-cut objectives, operational responsibility, local champions, compensation alignment, training, performance metrics, good governance models, escalation mechanisms, vendor integrity, good IT infrastructure and clear communication channels. The authors introduce and recommend using an “Offsourcing Maturity Model (OMM)” as a roadmap and risk management framework, which draws on the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model for software development. It consists of the following levels: staff augmentation (Level 1), turnkey projects (Level 2), process integration (Level 3), metrics-based management (Level 4) and optimized/organic operation (Level 5).

The book is loaded with statistics and research from various sources, strengthening the authors’ arguments. NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Services Companies – www.nasscom.org) is one of the mentioned prominent organizations. For the reader looking for motivation, these statistics coupled with snippets such as “GE currently spends about 9 per cent of its IT budget in India” do provide a push towards the direction of offshoring.

A complete guide to outsourcing?

This book is beyond doubt a pioneer in clearly explaining the whole process offshore outsourcing. It assumes an unbiased perspective and clearly explains the different aspects of offshore outsourcing with a lot of emphasis on outsourcing to India. In summary, this book is a must read for anyone considering an offshore strategy. After reading the book, one is in a much better position to evaluate the various available options and implement an effective strategy. Whether we like it or not, outsourcing is here to stay, and what better way to take a plunge into this area than to read this book that could have been titled “All You Ever Wanted To Know About Outsourcing”.

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Out of 5 “chilies”, our editorial team gave this article...

—About our writer:

Dr. Roopa Nishi Viswanathan,

“Live life by the day.” Born in Hyderabad, brought up in Mumbai, settled in Bangalore after a brief stint in the US, Dr. Roopa Nishi Viswanathan is a doctor-turned-biotechnologist-turned writer. Nishi loves reading anything and everything, travel, watching movies with her husband, exotic food, .....let’s simply say she loves living.

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