GloBus Insight Brief | Vol. 1 | No. 2 | 2011: Building Strategic and Operational Capabilities for Services Offshoring

The GloBus Insight Brief™ series covers strategic and operational challenges in the areas of information technology offshoring (ITO) and business process offshoring (BPO) in the form of periodic, insightful and independent reports, which organizations can immediately apply for business advantage. * Business Visas for Offshore Employees under Scrutiny (by Dr Wolfgang Messner) The ongoing legal case of Jack Palmer vs. Infosys has brought the story of business visas vs. work permits and their potential misuse for onsite assignments of offshore employees once again into the limelight of the media and the general public. GloBus Research estimates that only twenty per cent of offshoring projects are ‘clean’ in terms of adherence to visa rules. Middle managers of providers and clients alike are unsure about legal consequences for themselves and their companies. They need not only understand the key differences between the two visa types; they now need to join hands and enforce a strict adherence to rules in order to avoid legal and reputation risk. * Innovation through Offshore Sourcing (by Dr Wolfgang Messner) Over the past decade, offshore application development and maintenance (ADM) in low factor-cost countries such as India has emerged as a strong and convincing element of the service portfolio offered by multi-national providers and Indian pure-players alike. Many client companies have achieved substantial cost savings through offshoring and by industrialising their IT development and maintenance. The question is: what comes next? Where do the next improvements and savings come from? This paper shows how the Indian jugaad trait and bottom-up innovation in offshore delivery factories can be incentivised, controlled and the results used to implement delivery improvements leading to additional cost-savings or new business for the client. Managing this offshore IT innovation process is, however, not the sole responsibility of the offshore service provider. It also requires the involvement of and commitment by the client, who needs to develop and establish processes and metrics around incentivizing and managing bottom-up innovation from their offshore delivery team.