Digital Products & Re-conceiving Value

With many digital products customers create the value. 

They create the content that adds the value. e.g. Youtube

They need to attract the right sort of a crowd; those who are going to contribute. (This ties in with my previous blog on crowdsourcing.)

Hence the saying; "If you not paying for the product you are the product."

The old metrics for traditional economics do not apply to this new digital world.

Principles for managing PDT teams - Managing Global Local (case)

Problems:

• Understanding company context - sharing personal details - opening skype interviews with a personal story from each person. 
• Communication (different accents) - Skype - IM box 
• Heavy on documentation (need flexibility) - less formal
• Information sharing - each office was designing their own applications and were having problem with compatibility
• Time allocation (difference between those 50% committed and 100% committed)
• Running overtime
• Over engineering

Recommendations:

What they actually did?

• Because of the lack of feature governance; they needed to find a way to reinstate this, which was done by getting rid of requirement centres and establishing a single point of project ownership.
• There was a shift towards large textual information repository
• Got rid of group call with the aim of achieving more one-to-one communication going with individuals at different sites but on the same level.

Managing Globally Distributed Teams

Below I have outlined my notes and reviews from this weeks reading on managing globally distributed teams.

Krishna et al. (2004) Managing Cross-Cultural Issues in Global Software Outsourcing. Communications of the ACM. 47(4), 62-66

Problems faced when outsourcing IT software inlucde having to deal with distinct ways of working & cultural adaption.

How can these cross-cultural difficulties of global software outsourcing relationships be addressed?

1. Strategic choice of projects

• Projects e.g. Software that is embedded in the operating system or middleware does not require cultural understanding
• Learning

2. Managing the relationship

• Common systems & common processes can be used to do this
• Very difficult to harmonize major differences in norms and values, this is evident from the examples given, both of which I found to be very interesting;

The first example was of difficulties between Indian and British programmers. The British were very upfront about crticism in face to face meetings but the Indians would not voice criticism face-to-face and instead send it in an email afterwards, hence frustrating the british!

Also there was an example of Germans and Japanese working together, they both had different views on "after-hours" working but achieved a negotiated culture whereby the Japanese began to work a little less and the Germans a little more in order to meet a balanced in-between,.

3. Staffing issues

• Bridgehead teams (exchanging staff on a long term basis between cross cultural partners)
• Mixed cultural teams in the client country

Hiring people who can effectively bridge cultures; money, company reputation, personality fit all play important roles in this. Some of these components are more important in one country than the other. 

4. Training

Its a two way process!

• Pre-posting cultural training
• Programs on language and cultural practices
• Systematic on-the-job cross-cultural training (can be hard to transfer this intrinsic & experiential knowledge)

Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A. & Rosen, B. (2007) Leading Virtual Teams. Academy of Management Perspectives, 21, 60-70.

I really liked this article, especially as we are all taking part in PDT's for our ICT Project Management class. There were some helpful tips that could definitely be applied.

The six practices of Effective Virtual Team Leaders

1. Establish and maintain trust through use of communication technology - establish norms & revisit them repeatedly through virtual-get-togethers (reinvigorate)

2. Ensure diversity in the team is understood, appreciated, and leveraged - expertise directory, expertise matrix on team's virtual workspace, pairs from very different cultural backgrounds working together - greatest source of learning. Synchronous & Asynchronous collaboration rhythm

3. Manage virtual work cycle and meetings - brainstorming through all-team audio conferences, to turn meeting into choreographed events and ensure optimum productivity & creativity this event lifecycle can be used: 

• Pre-meeting practices - use threads to post and review each others documents, post only about disagreements, and have a clear agenda
• Start of meeting practice - share personal stories or hobbies
• During meeting practice - using check-in to keep members engaged e.g. votting polls, IM
• End of meeting practice - action lists for future assignments, minutes-on-the-go practice
• Between meeting practice - IM, threads, announcements, automatic notifications

4. Monitor team progress through the use of technology - tracking database, issue log, 

5. Enhance external visibility of the team and its members - Balance score cards, steering committees, "reporting out" to sponsoring managers, "certificate of contribution" clarifies how the individuals contribution to the team would help the managers own division. Recognition and rewards become easier when visibility is enhanced

6. Ensure individuals benefit from participating in virtual teams - virtual reward ceremonies, starting meetings with recognition of specific successes, praising a manager for having a great employee. Team members generally gravitate to those commitments that give them the greatest benefits in terms of intellectual growth, visibility, and fun - leaders appeal to this by having mini-lectures from experts, virtual meetings with executives, internet scavenger hunts, virtual celebrations.

Because of the risk involved, the payoffs from virtual teams need to be substantial. The phrase "Think Global, Act Local" reflects the creative capacity of virtual teams. 

The term "Forewarned and Forearmed" is particularly true when it comes to virtual leadership and management.

Enterprise Crowdsourcing & Google Glass Review

Today I attended a seminar on Enterprise Crowdsourcing presented by Prof. Erran Carmel from Kogod School of Business, American University, Washington DC.

Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing that works on the premise of tapping into online workers on demand, and paying these workers a very small portion of money in return for very small contributions of work.

Prof. Carmel actually stated that he preferred the term "The Human Cloud" over "Crowdsourcing" as it is a better suggestion of labor markets.

I learned that all the biggest enterprises are doing this, including companies such as IBM and Google.

Some of the examples he gave that caught my attention included  

Amazon - Are seen as the crowdsourcing "giants" and one of the founders of this sector with their Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zappos - An online retailing company that discovered that the grammatical correctness of their product reviews effected sales so they used crowdsourcing to clean up up the English of their reviews!.

Text eagle - In Kenya m-Pesa was used to transfer small amounts of money via mobile to individuals who carried out tiny tasks on their 2G mobiles.

Microsoft - The company wanted to test its Security Essentials product globally and used uTest to assist them in this.
Genpact - is a business process management company that created their own crowdsourcing platform. 

He also wore a pair of Google's latest Google glass glasses, if that's how you say it!? It was interesting to see a pair of these in the flesh and watch him record and take photos on it. I loved hearing about his review as much of it wasn't necessarily what Google would want you to hear. Some of his comments included:

• That the glasses "didn't do enough for him"; the apps were limited.

• He used it mostly for taking pictures and video recording. 

• It was somewhat uncomfortable for him to wear the glasses and deal with curious stares from others.

• If he wanted to put sunglasses on he couldn't! 

• The battery life was very limited - it would die after 30 minutes of recording.

Although he was critical he felt sure that it was nothing Google couldn't solve in the near future, but his gut feeling was that Google Glass is perhaps not 100% ready for the market as of yet. 

One thing he was sure of was that within the next ten years we would be most definitely all wearing wearable technology and that privacy would be a thing of the past! He seemed a little too sure of this to be honest which actually scared me a little! I'd like to think my privacy would be somewhat intact no matter how far into the future I could see!

Governance and Distributed Teams

This is the result from our glass discussion on Governance, whereby we linked the theory and concepts from our book with the following article; Vlaar et al. (2008) Cocreating Understanding and Value in Distributed Work: How members of onsite and offshore vendor teams Give, make, demand, and break sense.

Each person in the class wrote a concept on a post-it and those that related to one another were placed near each other on the whiteboard. Some of the issues that arose included:

• The role of boundary spanners (having a single point of contact)
• Service Level Agreements (SLA's)
• Training (on-site vs offsite, onshore vs. offshore)
• Knowledge transfer
• How as students we are managing our own Partially Distributed Team (PDT) assignments
• Technological infrastructure (importance of having it in place before starting a global project with distributed teams)
• Tools for communication & collaboration

In terms of the article mentioned above some of the main findings and terms that arose from it and that contributed to our discussion on the above include:

1. The sociocognitive acts and communication processes members of distributed work teams use to advance their understandings:

Sensemaking: e.g. observing, reasoning, analyzing, contemplating, anticipating, imagining
Sense giving: attempt to alter and influence the way others think and act, e.g.: descriptions, explanations, signals
Sensedemadinging: actively seeking information, e.g. asking questions,
Sensebreaking: questioning exisiting understandings, e.g. negative criticism, big picture presentations that highlight radically different views from the ones currently existing.

2. The idea of asymmetrics between knowledge and experience:

Both congruence and actionability are needed for this:

Congruence - the term congruence qualifies the relationship between the expectations held and the actions and outcomes produced by different individuals.

Actionability - the capability of members to configure and execute action patterns in a manner coherently ties to someone else's expectations.

Transition Processes & Keeping PACE with the local Case Study

Tiwari, V. (2009) Transition During Offshore Outsourcing: A Process Model. ICIS 2009. Phoenix, Arizona, USA., International Conference on Information Systems.

UtilCo outsourcing the CUSTOMER project to Global Vendor (both onshore & offshore). This involved specific application development and maintenance activities.

Transitioning from onshore to offshore involves a combination of three inter-related organizational processes: Transfer, Learning, and Adaption.

The transition stage was split into three phase. Below I have outlined the main difficulties that were encountered throughout these stages and some of the steps taken to rectify them. 

1. Familiarize

Knowledge transfer:

There was difficulties with uncooperative contractors & a lack of tracking tools.

2. Adapt

Modifying Operating Model: Task division, communication structure, and delivery process:

Pilot stages - splitting team functions across geographies - complicated matters - maybe they should have keep activities that related closely and overlapped with one another together in one region.

There were problems with communication and role responsibilities - adaptive measures taken to resolve these.

Increasing knowledge and Understanding: High complexity work:

New pilots - higher complexity, lower volume - combining more functional consultancy along with technical development activities - facilitated further learning

Achieved Managed Operations (MO) state - UtilCo have official management responisibility of the entire delivery process (from Business requirements to business testing) but are using Global Vendor for all their activities from Functional design to functional testing

Restructuring retained organization: roles and internal processes:

Problems with changing the internal organization structure in terms of communication and operations - loss of flexibility - stages have to be complete before sending them offsite - makes amendments a lot more complicated

Shift from doing the activities to monitoring the activities - loss of creativity  autonomy. Reviewing rather than designing - new roles defined - professionals, specialists, and forecasting professional

3. Accelerate

Validating Modifications: pseudo service delivery and ramp-up

Aimed to progress to Managed Services (MS) - (including delivery & giving them more responsibility) 

Needed to hire new onshore and offshore personnel to handle increased work volume that came with the increased responsibility - mainly junior developers that had to learn quickly. Issues with knowledge imbalance between global vendor who could hire experienced contractors and Uticle whose contractors had left and new hired were inexperienced.

Redefining roles and ramp down of contractors - additional stress on retained personnel

Utilco intended the transition to be staged - but felt like big bang to staff

Outcome: Service delivery

Two months of psuedo delivery. Actual service delivery was achieved with satisfied performance from both firms (vague on the details!)

In class we considered the following questions through group discussion:

What is the contribution?
What led to success?
Key Quotes.
Whats the basic story?
What would you do differently?
What would you do?

Issues:
Transparency
Contractors
Knowledge transfer (resolution - knowledge transfer document)
Communication/Resp
Contract

Biggest risk a company can take is change. Here in this case we have organizational change, it involved a lot of plugging in and out of parts. There has been a number of pieces of literature written about organizational change such as what we witness in this case. One such example is Lewin's change management model which consists of three stages; unfreeze, change, and refreeze. 

The potential value for technology and outsourcing in this case is big (not marginal/instrumental). You have to trip up sometimes to figure out how to work. Its ok to fail as long as your prepared to addressed that. Its all about what attitude you have; instrumental rigor, attentiveness, etc

PACE Case Study 

The transition to offshore was problematic - transition period was too long and PACE don't make money until they move offshore.

With PACE the clients got everything, competency, rare skills. For them making transition was all risk, and why risk it when they were getting everything they needed onshore.

Possible solutions:

1. A differential cost model; ramp-up cost model if clients decided to stay on-site.
2. Maybe they should have pivoted and become a research company rather than an engineering company

Anxiety and Psychological Security in Off-shoring Relationships

Kelly, S. & Noonan, C. (2008) Anxiety and psychological security in offshoring relationships: the role and development of trust as emotional commitment. Journal of Information Technology, 23, 232–248.

18 month period in Irish firm (NetTrade) during which a decision was made to outsource the development of a replacement for their core technology  to the offshore facilities of a large Indian software vendor (IndiaSoft).

The article gives us a clear insight into the relevant theories on globalization, risk, anxiety, and the production of trust before going into the case study details, these include the following:

Gidden's two types of trust:

1. Trust in abstract systems - based on faceless commitment (e.g. banks; as a customer we may not fully understand the "backstage" operations - access points with knowledge experts represents and establishes our trust in that system, e.g. financial broker. Emotional trust is based on our continuous  interactions with these representatives, until the trust becomes habitus.
2. Personal trust - based on facework commitments

Mayer et al.'s characteristics of trust:

1. Ability - the skills, competencies, and characteristics that enable a party to have influence within a specific domain.
2. Benevolence - the extent to which a trustee is believed to want to do good to the trustor. 
3. Integrity - the trustors perception that the trustee adheres to a set of principles that the trustor finds acceptable

Zucker's three key modes of establishing trust:

1. Process based - based on personal experience either through direct informal interaction or by formal indirect mechanisms based on reputation.
2. Character based - based on labeling or stereotyping based on certain characteristics. These characteristics are used as an index for trust.
3. Institutional based - based on person specific (e.g. certificates representing credibility) or intermediary mechanisms (insuring against loss e.g. insurance)

Courtship (establishing trust)

1. Process based

• Direct - recommendations from friends, initial negotiations with Indiasoft
• Indirect - The economist, reference clients

2. Institutional based

• Person specific - certificates

3. Characteristic based

• Integrity - well aligned values (humility)
• Benevolence - care & attentiveness (reassurance they wouldn't be lost within the grander scale of things), allowed them to pay in small installments
• "Good vibes" - emotional commitment - main determinant

Cohabitation (constructing a stable collaborative order)

1. Signalling

• Praising one project team member over another - causing removal of the unfavorable one

2. Brokering

• Boundary Spanners - individuals who facilitate sharing
• Eased anxiety when communication was failing - had someone in "both camps" -  Stephen
• Complicated when boundary spanner develops close ties e.g. Indian broker Sunil told by superiors not to share code - awkward moment telling John (conflicting loyalties)

3. Third man

• Outside third party - no relation
• Aggresive questioning of Sunil (who was displeased) - this was uncomfortable for John and would not have taken place without the third man.

Following the reading of this case it led me to think about the definition of trust and how it is established:

We Have a Problem Heuston Case Study

Tom is running a product concept and design company. He outsources activities to Suhas in India.

Below in an analysis of the relationships, problems and possible resolutions:

Class discussion on Knowledge Management Systems

Knowledge and Expertise Management

Kelly, S. & Jones, M. (2001) Groupware and the Social Infrastructure of Communication: Communication technologies can supplement, but never supplant the value of social bonds and trusting relationships. Communications of the ACM. 44(12) 77-79.

This reading was based on BlueCorp, a large consulting firm. It outlines the difference between success and failure in terms of groupware adaptation within the different offices.

The problem was not the production of knowledge, it was that this knowledge was not being captured in the best possible way.

The Washington case was an exemplar of success. The head of this practice was a great leader in terms of reassuring, addressing fears, and sharing information. He recognized the importance of social interaction, trust, and power outside of the software. He cultivated the social environment to facilitate new forms of cooperative interaction among the staff.

One key passage highlights how important face-to-face interaction is as one employee explains how he wouldn't put everything into the repository, but just enough so that it would make people come to him for his services. This helps build rapport and respect based on their personal interactions.

Rottman, J. (2008) Successful knowledge transfer within offshore supplier networks: a case study exploring social capital in strategic alliances. Journal of Information Technology, 23, 31–43.

This article explores social capital, which is the idea that knowledge and resources are exchanged, work gets done, and value is created through social relationships.

Dimensions of social capital analysed:

1. Structural 
2. Cognitive
3. Relational

Network types:

1. Intracorporate networks - a group of organizations operating under a unified corporate identity, with the headquarters of the network having controlling ownership interest in its subsidiaries.
2. Industrial districts - independent firms sharing similar goals and geographic areas who utilize similar producers, pull from the same labor pool and target similar markets.
3. Strategic alliances - formed by firms located in different positions or in the same position in the value chain.

The article outlines the efforts of the Software Center of Excellence (SCE) within a US manufacturing firm and its interactions with its network suppliers.

The company outsourced key work to multiple suppliers. Issues of Intellectual knowledge are addressed by drawing boundaries. This is done by breaking up suppliers so that each one has knowledge only on one particular part of the business operations. There are no boundaries in terms of knowledge sharing, they instead are investing in engagement by outsourcing to so many and building specialist knowledge.

There are added transaction costs and management overheads associated with this sort of outsourcing model, but it creates a community of knowledge that goes beyond the boundaries of the firm. So much so that the firm was unaware of the implicit tacit knowledge that had built up over time with their suppliers. This was actually a big reason for the initial failure. This issue was addressed by investing in social capital e.g. visiting its supplier sites. 

Emotional Labour & Quality Processes

Nath 2011. Aesthetic and emotional labour through stigma: national identity management and racial abuse in offshored Indian call centres. Work Employment Society. 25(4) 709–725 

The paper investigates a number of agents experiences of national identity management which includes the following:

• Accent training and modification - to avoid racial abuse, invasive questions, keep call time to minimum, facilitate understanding
• Pseudonyms and location masking
• Racial abuse
• Coping with stigma - Internalize, masked resistance, correction attempts, indifference, diversion, distancing

Some of the issues related to emotional labour that came up in the class discussion included:

• Cultural
• Stigma - MTI
• Workload
• Real problems (depression, alcoholism) 
• Control
• Responsibility 

Keeni, G. (2000) The Evolution of Quality Processes at TATA Consultancy Services. IEEE Software, 17, 79-88.

TATA is the largest software and management consultancy in southern Asia. This article focuses on the measure undertaken to ensure quality. These includes:

• Quality Assurance Groups (QAGs) - late 80's
• Quality Management System (QMS) - early 90's
• ISO 9000 - early 90's
• Institutionalization of audits & project management reviews
• Activity-based costing (cost drivers - value-adding effort vs non-value-adding effort)
• The Integrated Project Management System - Introduced automation of data collection & analysis to encourage employees to document and accept metrics (provided additional training/workshops/meetings to convince them)
• Software Capability Maturity Model (CMM) - Pilots at US West & HP centers resulted in knowledge sharing, mentors & Process primes, and process automation. Key to deployment was staff involvement & TCS Certified Quality Analyst Initiative. 
• The Tata Business Excellence Model

 The results & benefits witnessed include an increase in the following:

• Effort estimation - slippage & rework reductions
• Review effectiveness - increase in early error detection  
• Product Quality 
• Customer benefits - reduced project management effort
• Benefits to the organization - support groups, competitive environment

The article doesn't mention the problems/motivators behind installing these quality processes. It was necessary to go outside of the reading to see what the problems were that encouraged them to implement quality controls. Its clearly evident that TATA is a company that's always stumbling. 

The article itself is just a narrative; there is no written evidence of  the real connections with employees or how the work is done. The article focuses instead on the systems, describing them in a way that is too packaged and polished.

This makes the article impossible to understand or use. How could this narrative be used to add to/help my management processes? The answer is it couldn't.

The Twelve Supplier Capabilities

Feeny, Lacity, and Wilcocks (2005) have identified 12 key supplier capabilities that clients should take into account when looking for a vendor.

1. Leadership - as found by Feeny et al. the main differentiating factor between success and failure was the individual leading the supplier teams. Failures resulted from firstly focusing too much on business issues. Second, from bad relations between leaders of the suppliers and either/or/both the clients teams and and the top management for the suppliers organization.
2. Business management - Suppliers should avoid situations where they are being exploited by their clients or dependent on one client. They become too closely tied together as the worse your clients business gets, the worse your business gets.
3. Domain expertise - The ability to retain and apply professional knowledge; this can be done by moving procurement people to a clients site to acquire new knowledge.
4. Behavior management - The ability to motivate and inspire people to deliver services of high value. Once again this can be done by transferring employees onto client sites to go through a "harmonization" process
5. Sourcing - The ability to access necessary resources, for example by generating economies of scale, using superior infrastructure, or enhancing procurement practices.
6. Process improvement - The capability to change processes in a way that generates a dramatic improvement. Methods include using supplier track records, six sigma methodologies, or other quality control measure such as CMM.
7. Technology exploitation - This is considered one of the key capabilities for BPO.
8. Program management - Ability to manage, prioritize, coordinate, and mobilize at both the individual project level and for a set of inter-related projects. 
9. Customer development - As a supplier you want an educated customer, so that they can make informed decisions. This can be done through consistent personal contact and cooperation.
10. Planning and contracting - Being capable of planning resources in a way that creates a "win-win" situation for both the supplier and customer.
11. Organizational design - The capability required to design and implement successful organisation arrangements. According to Feeny et al. (2005) it takes approximately 2 years to reach an organizational fit between client and supplier.
12. Governance - Key issues include ensuring that contracts are in place and that decision making is visible and accountable.

The 12 capabilities can be categorized into three key competencies:

1. Delivery competency - The suppliers ability to respond to the customer's ongoing needs.
2. Transformation competency - The suppliers ability to deliver radically improved service in terms of quality and cost.
3. Relationship competency - The suppliers willingness and ability to align its business model to the values, goal, and needs of the customer.

Symantec Case Study & A.T Kearney's Global Index

Symantec aspires to go global.

Problems

1. Financials

• Not growing fast enough

2. Localizing versions

• Translating and enabling systems, guides - radical rewrites & design?
• Packaging (manufacturing)
• Testing on computers and operating systems in the different areas

Choices

1. Outsource
2. Manage in-house
3. Leave it to re-sellers & distributors to create localized versions and handle the manufacturing for each national market (done so currently in Japan, but means most of the sales rev is going to Japanese re-sellers, deals with non US manufacturers bundling versions could also bring in more money and reach new
customers)
4. Single division responsible for all language & manufacturing or should it be farmed out to each national office - problem with multiple divisions - quality control, marketing, message management e.g. product name translated differently in each country

Solution - have a European headquarter, but where?
1. Ireland
2. Israel
3. India

As a group in class we began to brainstorm on the different dimensions that may effect our chosen country.

Country	Ireland	India	Israel
Dimension
Digital
Proximity to market
Multi Lingual
Infrastructure
Education/skills
Stability (Political)
Corruption
Work Ethic
Time zone
Distance (FTS)
Legal/regulation
Cost ( HR etc)	3K	250	?
Culture
Past History
Reputation
Macro Econ (local)
Climate
Labour Market	10K Graduates per yr	500K	10K

In the end 18 people voted for India, 11 for Ireland (including myself), and 0 for Israel. Ireland seemed like a logical  choice mainly because of its location. This would mean cutting down on transport costs, avoiding currency exchanges, and benefiting from being apart of the EU, e.g. in terms of free movement of goods and labour, favorable laws and regulations etc.

From researching Symantec's current situation with outsourcing it seems they choose Ireland as their outsourcing location. Today it remains the main manufacturing headquarters in Europe, but they have chosen to set up other functions such as R&D and customer support across a variety of countries throughout the EU and and Southeast Asia. This has allowed the company to mix and match the different benefits available to them across a range of countries.

A.T Kearney's Global Index was a good starting point in helping us determine dimensions for the Symantec case, but we also identified some downsides of the consultant companies research paper. These are highlighted in the table below.

Good	Use it? Trust? Reference?	Bad
Factual	Useful at a city level	Out dated
Article generates o/o		Model transparency
Good Methodology