Sunday, 06 February 2011 00:00

More Jobs Shipped to India

Rate this item

(0 votes)

Ship leaving port

Friday brought news of another company outsourcing part of their IT. The details are sketchy, but it appears that all the COBOL programmers (many counting days until retirement) are going to have their jobs moved half way around the world. Soon after, it sounds like the IT infrastructure and operations will follow. Friends lamented about more jobs going overseas. I had to ask what other options management had. I did not hear any alternatives.

To the dismay of my cohorts and their potential pink slips, I am less concerned about outsourcing the administration of servers, networks, and base applications. For most companies, those are not the systems unique to their mission. These days, those functions are utilities. However, outsourcing customized systems that are at the heart of how a company does its business and distinguishes itself to its customer, is very risky. It may be the only option now; however, it could have been avoided.

No One Here Can Do The Work

First, look at reality. There are no new COBOL programmers coming out of American universities. The least sexy area of study in the computer science department is COBOL—if you can study it. The name even makes you want to yawn—Common Business Oriented Language. The people that know COBOL started in business fresh out of college in the 70s. Simple math puts the younger ones close to their sixties.

Outsourcing Core Business

The risk? Knowing the language is only a small fraction of the knowledge required to maintain a system. Losing the understanding of how the few million lines of code run, the subtleties of how they support the business, and interaction of the modules is a huge risk. No amount of documentation will ever replace the experience that came from changing one line off code that left of a municipal tax. It was not enough to make the invoice run look real low, but three weeks later when taxes were due, someone in accounting noticed something very wrong.

The Politically Incorrect Option

One option, if you cannot find trained students, is to bring the COBOL developers onshore. The expense is higher, but the technical risk much lower. The real problem is the massive political undertaking. Headlines reading "Unemployment At Record Highs, Company Hires People From India," would be a public relations nightmare. Politicians would spin it this way and that to make it beneficial them or detrimental to their opponent.

Management has been painted into a corner. Unfortunately, they are holding the paintbrush. The solution is never getting to the point of obsolescence.

Averting The Situation

We all know the answer. When we buy a house, we know we have to do maintenance. Small items, like painting and replacing carpets, are done on an as needed basis, and can be postponed when budgets are tight. Replacing the roof or rotting LP siding are projects that we think about years in advance—before the wind, the rain, and the bugs encroach. To protect our investment, we modernize the entire house, adding a garage, or remodeling to add another room or two. If it looks like the neighborhood is heading into disrepair, we sell as quickly as possible and move to a better investment—one that will take us into the future securely.

Unfortunately, businesses that are stuck with difficult to maintain, twenty-year-old systems only have themselves to blame. They chose to try to get one, two, three, or more years out of that "roof" and now the upgrade is getting to be impossible, since no one works on slate roofs anymore. Averting this problem needed impetus a decade or two ago. Taking the expense and challenge to upgrade systems, migrate to newer technology, and stay in the mainstream instead of letting technical debt increase incessantly.

The winners are the people in India, China, or Vietnam that are getting new jobs. The losers are corporate America that has just found another way to kick the can down the road another few years.

Conclusion

The lure of postponing system replacements for short-term savings and improved quarterly reports only delays the inevitable. These projects are tough; they are laden with minefields and booby traps. The only path to success is a superlative team, strong planning, and contingency funds. When it is all in place, plan a little more. But, it goes nowhere without the team. This requires leadership and continuous training of your staff in the technology that aligns with your company's strategic plan.

(You do understand how technology relates to the strategic plan, right? Okay, you had better spend a few days digesting the strategic plan, getting your team together, and building a technology roadmap.)

Read 10145 times

Tagged under

Related items

Filling Execution Gaps: Building Success-Focused Organizations

Executives define vision, strategy, and goals to advance the business. Projects enable companies to meet those goals. Between strategy and projects, there is a lot of work to be done—work that lays the foundation for project and operational success. Through experience and research, six common gaps exist in organizations that inhibit project success—an absence of common understanding, disengaged executive sponsors, misalignment with goals, poor change management, ineffective governance, and lackluster leadership.
Get Recognized as a Leader: Four Core Leadership Actions

Leaders make decisions. This requires a core set of actions to gather the best information, hear out the concerns of others, and making a decision that everyone will follow—even if there is not unanimous agreement with the decision. Although there are hundreds of actions leaders must take, there are four core actions that all great leaders do—listening, dialog and discussion, selling a vision, and eliminating blame. This session will discuss those actions in a roundtable format that we call a "What Would You Do?" session. In these sessions, the presenter acts as a moderator spending 10 to 15 minutes per topic working with the audience talking about what the action is, how to best do it, and hearing from the group on how they have carried out the action. This brings significant audience interaction, involvement, and broader education.
Strategy-Execution Gaps
The statistics on strategy execution are dismal:
- 59% of middle managers fail at resolving conflicts in corporate strategy.
- 45% of middle managers cannot name one of the top five corporate goals.
- 64% of cross-department/functional issues are poorly resolved.
And maybe as you could expect from this:
- 53% of companies cannot react timely to new opportunities.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this trajectory is not going to launch most companies’ latest strategic plans successfully. In fact, these data might make you feel that middle management would be better suited as test dummies for the next generation of manned space-vehicle. Granted, the data show there is a dearth of leadership in middle management, but the executive tier has a culpable hand.
Process Mapping

<p>Sorry, your browser cannot display frames!</p>

Process is at the core of any business. It makes work predictable, repeatable, and transferable. Without it we cannot scale our businesses. However, process can be a bane to making progress. Processes that work for a $10 million company have difficulties supporting a $30 million company. Trying to scale them to a $300 million company will not only fail but not address the issues that larger companies have that were never dreamt of in a smaller organization. Processes need to be discarded, revamped, and built—all of that without creating an overburdening bureaucracy.

Anytime you need to go someplace, you first have to know where you are. Processes are never static and your company's current state is probably far from where you think it is. Hence, the first step is mapping out you company's current state followed by defining the future state. This is more than a logical map of the process; it must also include physical maps. Whether your process is solely to provide a service (say, website development) or physical (say, manufacturing) there are logistical issues that complicate the process flow. Without fully understanding those nuances, future state processes will not reach the desired efficiencies.

For more information about process mapping fill out the form to the left and we will get in touch with you.
Success vs Culture
The other day a Latvian student contacted me for my views the connection between culture and success criteria—an important and intriguing topic. After working in Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Israel, United States, and Canada, I wear many scars of both blatant and subtle cultural violations. I also know that within a culture one person's success is often another person's failure. So, after dispelling concerns about clicking on some random email link, I completed her survey (please feel free to take it yourself). In the process, I struck up a friendship with the student, Kristine Briežkalne, who is studying at Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration . She has some interesting views and presented me with a Venn diagram showing four frames to a project (business, client, project management, and growth perspectives) and how they intersected. As the diagram is part of her Master's thesis, I will let you ponder the how to label the overlapping areas (an eye-opening exercise).