Global Outsourcing of Professional Services

As a growing number of firms outsource more of their professional services across geographic and temporal boundaries, one is faced with a corresponding need to examine the long-term ramifications on business and society. Some persons are convinced that cost considerations should reign as the predominant decision-making factor; others argue that outsourcing means permanent job loss; and still others believe outsourcing makes US goods and services more competitive in the global marketplace. We assert that if outsourcing options need to be analyzed in detail with critical objectivity in order to derive benefits for the concerned constituencies

Toward the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory in Software Development

“The Sun never sets on the British Empire,” was a notion emphasized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to highlight that the British Empire was far-flung, and that the sun was always visible from some part of this vast empire. While the British Empire has gradually disintegrated, we can now coin an equivalent notion: “The Sun never sets on the 24-hour Knowledge Factory!

Global Outsourcing of Professional Services

As a growing number of firms , especially those in the United States, outsource more of their professional services across geographic and temporal boundaries. Using a multi-faceted framework for this study, this paper shows that very careful analysis is needed to establish the optimal level and structure for the 24-hour Knowledge Factory., one is faced with a corresponding need to examine the long-term ramifications on business and society. Some persons are convinced that cost considerations should reign as the prevalent predominant decision-making factor, ; others argue Many of the immediate conclusions being drawn by stakeholders, such as that outsourcing means permanent job loss, ; and still others believe outsourcing makes US goods and services more competitive in the global marketplace. that short-term investments are sufficient,We assert that if outsourcing options need to be analyzed in detail with critical objectivity in order to derive benefits for the concerned constituencies

Toward the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The term 24-Hour Knowledge Factory connotes a globally distributed work environment in which members of the global team work on a project around the clock; each member of the team works the normal workday hours that pertain to his or her time zone. At the end of such a workday, a fellow team member located in a different time zone continues the same task. This creates the shift-style workforce that was originally conceived in the manufacturing sector. A globally distributed 24-hour call center is the simplest manifestation of this paradigm. The true example of the 24-hour factory paradigm discussed in this paper involves groups working together to accomplish a given set of deliverables, such as a software project, and transcending conventional spatial and temporal boundaries

Global Outsourcing of Professional Services

As a growing number of firms outsource more of their professional services across geographic and temporal boundaries, one is faced with a corresponding need to examine the long-term ramifications on business and society. Some persons are convinced that cost considerations should reign as the predominant decision-making factor; others argue that outsourcing means permanent job loss; and still others believe outsourcing makes U.S. goods and services more competitive in the global marketplace. We assert that if outsourcing options need to be analyzed in detail with critical objectivity in order to derive benefits for the concerned constituencies

Toward the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The term “24-Hour Knowledge Factory” connotes a globally distributed work environment in which members of the global team work on a project around the clock; each member of the team works the normal workday hours that pertain to his or her time zone. At the end of such a workday, a fellow team member located in a different time zone continues the same task. This creates the shift-style workforce that was originally conceived in the manufacturing sector. A globally distributed 24-hour call center is the simplest manifestation of this paradigm. The true example of the 24-hour factory paradigm discussed in this paper involves groups working together to accomplish a given set of deliverables, such as a software project, and transcending conventional spatial and temporal boundaries

The Use of Information Systems in Collocated and Distributed Teams: A Test of the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

Recent academic and policy studies focus on offshoring as a cost-of-labor driven activity that has a direct impact on employment opportunities in the countries involved. This paper broadens this perspective by introducing and evaluating the 24-hour knowledge factory as a model of information systems offshoring that leverages other strategic factors beyond cost savings. A true 24-hour knowledge factory ensures that progress is being made on information systems related tasks at all times of day by utilizing talented information systems professionals around the globe. Many organizations currently implement other variants of offshoring that appear similar but are fundamentally distinct. The typical model is a service provider framework in which an offshore site provides service to the central site, often with two centers and a distinction between a primary center and secondary center. Entire tasks are often outsourced to the lower-cost overseas site and sent back when completed. In contrast, the 24-hour knowledge factory involves continuous and collaborative round-the-clock knowledge production achieved by sequentially and progressively distributing the knowledge creation task around the globe, completing one cycle every 24 hours. Thus, the 24-hour knowledge factory creates a virtual distributed team, in contrast to a team that is collocated in one site, either onshore or offshore. By organizing knowledge tasks in this way, the 24-hour knowledge factory has the potential to work faster, to provide cheaper solutions, and to achieve better overall performance. Previous studies have examined individual teams over time and explored various benefits of distributing work to distant teams, but have not directly compared the effect of collocation versus geographic distribution on the use of information systems and the overall performance over time of two real-world teams working on a similar task in controlled conditions. This paper highlights the concept of the 24-hour knowledge factory and tests the model in a controlled field experiment that directly compares the use of information systems and subsequent performance in collocated and globally distributed software development teams. The central finding is that while collocation versus geographic distribution changes the way teams use information systems and interact at key points during a project, each type of team has the potential to use information systems to leverage its inherent advantages, to overcome disadvantages, and ultimately, to perform equally well. In other words, one organizational structure is not inherently superior nor must structure pre-determine performance. Geographic distance introduces new challenges but these can be overcome – and even leveraged for strategic advantage. In sum, our findings suggest that firms can apply the 24-hour knowledge factory model to transition from a service provider framework in which offshoring is a short-term and unilateral cost-saving tactic to a strategic partnership between centers in which offshoring becomes a core component of a global corporate strategy

Offshoring: The Transition From Economic Drivers Toward Strategic Global Partnership and 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The concept of offshoring of professional services first gained attention slightly over 25 years ago. At that time, US companies began to realize the cost-advantage of getting their computer software developed in India and other countries. The concept gained momentum with the advent of Internet and the availability of inexpensive communication technologies. Unrelated events, such as the need to address the Y2K problem, in a timebound manner, further increased the use of computer personnel based in faraway places. Studies conducted by professional organizations, such as ACM, IEEE, and NSPE, focus on the cost and labor aspects of offshoring and its direct impact on employment opportunities in the countries involved. This paper broadens this perspective by emphasizing that the key drivers for offshoring will be strategic, not economic, over time. A formal mathematical model is presented to highlight the new trend. Further, instead of a binary model in which the work is performed in the country of the sponsoring organization or a different country, we will gradually see a new work paradigm in which the work is performed in a sequence in factories located in multiple continents of the world. Such 24-Hour Knowledge Factories can leverage factors beyond cost savings. One can employ professionals in multiple parts of the world, perform tasks at all times of the day, and bring new products and services quicker to the market. Just as the advent of multiple shifts allowed machines to be utilized round the clock leading to the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, the creation of new globally distributed workforces and global partnerships can lead to major strategic advantages for companies and countries alike

Use of Collaborative Technologies and Knowledge Sharing in Co-located and Distributed Teams: Towards the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory

The relocation of knowledge work to emerging countries is leading to an increasing use of Globally Distributed Teams (GDT) engaged in complex tasks. In the present study, we investigate a particular type of GDT working ‘around the clock’: the 24 hours knowledge factory (Gupta, 2008). Adopting the productivity perspective on knowledge sharing (Haas and Hansen, 2005, 2007), we develop 11 hypotheses to compare technology use, knowledge sharing processes, and performance of a 24 hours knowledge factory with a co-located team. We conducted a quasi-experiment in IBM and collected both quantitative and qualitative data, over a period of 12 months, on a GDT and a co-located team. Both teams were composed of the same number of professionals, provided with the same technologies, engaged in similar tasks, and given similar deadlines. We found that they differed in their use of technologies and in knowledge sharing processes, but not in efficiency and quality of outcomes. We show how the co-located team and the GDT enacted a knowledge codification strategy and a personalization strategy respectively; in each case, they grafted elements of the other strategy in order to attain both knowledge re-use and creativity. We conclude by discussing theoretical contributions to knowledge sharing and GDT literatures, and by highlighting managerial implications to those organizations interested in developing a fully functional 24 hour knowledge factory

Technology Forecasting Using Data Mining and Semantics: First Annual Report

The planning and management of research and development is a challenging process which is compounded by the large amounts of information which is available. The goal of this project is to mine science and technology databases for patterns and trends which facilitate the formation of research strategies. Examples of the types of information sources which we exploit are diverse and include academic journals, patents, blogs and news stories. The intended outputs of the project include growth forecasts for various technological sectors (with an emphasis on sustainable energy), an improved understanding of the underlying research landscape, as well as the identification of influential researchers or research groups. This paper focuses on the development of techniques to both organize and visualize the data in a way which reflects the semantic relationships between keywords. We studied the use of the joint term frequencies of pairs of keywords, as a means of characterizing this semantic relationship – this is based on the intuition that terms which frequently appear together are more likely to be closely related. Some of the results reported herein describe: (1) Using appropriate tools and methods, exploitable patterns and information can certainly be extracted from publicly available databases, (2) Adaptation of the Normalized Google Distance (NGD) formalism can provide measures of keyword distances that facilitate keyword clustering and hierarchical visualization, (3) Further adaptation of the NGD formalism can be used to provide an asymmetric measure of keyword distances to allow the automatic creation of a keyword taxonomy, and (4) Adaptation of the Latent Semantic Approach (LSA) can be used to identify concepts underlying collections of keywords