Monday, October 10, 2005

Lilia Tsalalikhin, VP and CMO, Luxoft

Last week I attended a talk by the VP of Marketing of a Russian outsourcing vendor called Luxoft. As you might imagine, a marketing person for an outsourcer was overly positive about the benefits of outsourcing, but at least she was open about the challenges her company faces being from Russia. I still think the whole outsourcing movement is overblown and will return to reasonable levels of hype in the next few years. She said many companies are moving mission critical development to India and some are creating a new executive role called the Chief Resource Officer (CRO), but I don't think it will last. My stance on outsourcing is that you should only send "context" type work that requires little to no innovation and can be easily defined within specs. Also, you have to spend just as much time managing the project (and maybe a bit more) as you did if it was in-house. If you don't closely manage the vendor, you can waste a lot of time and money. I've seen several projects fail because they didn't follow these rules of thumb.

Lilia Tsalalikhin's bio

Notes:
  • Outsourcing is fastest growing tech segment
  • Some companies are sending mission critical projects offshore (ugh)
  • Lots of consolidation going on among outsourcing vendors
  • Many companies are creating a Chief Resource Officer (CRO) role to manage global outsourcing (double ugh)
  • CMM and ISO certification is not of utmost importance to clients
  • India is far and away the leader with China second
  • Outsourcing is political and economical phenomena
  • Press rarely write about Russia outsourcing
  • Russia has a lot of issues: gov't policies, lack of US presence, US perceptions, etc.
  • No well developed models for measuring Return On Outsourcing (ROO). Good area for students to do research.

    • posted by Robbie Allen @ 10/10/2005 09:33:00 AM   2 comments  

    2 Comments:

    At 10/10/2005 03:20:29 PM, Yoav said...

    I have the same stance on outsourcing as you...

     
    At 4/04/2006 12:50:18 PM, Viktoria Krasilshikova said...

    I disagree. Denying future to outsourcing is groundless. I stance on global redistribution of work. Modern day States (countries, if you will) are still fighting to keep pure and boarder-some, however, as we see with the EU, there is a surge for unity, new ideas penetrate boundaries, and there is nothing to stop them. Globalization is much talked of, but nobody seems to really believe it is coming. It’s a painful process, but I think that finally, we’ll all end up collectively living on planet Earth, and faster then it may at first appear. Thus, outsourcing work elsewhere becomes as logical as going out and buying sneakers, instead of crafting a pair yourself. And don’t be fooled by the downgrade, it is not that we are becoming too smart for making our own shoes, and are better off going to college and making more money managing shoemakers. No, we outsource genetic engineering too, and chemistry (I don’t make my own phase-cleaning stuff or lotion), and I call a vet when my horse colics. It’s just that we do better and grander things if we concentrate on one thing, sort of. You pick something you like doing, or are good at, and start doing it for most of your day. Same may happen with geographical regions. Whole regions will concentrate on one thing, and they’ll be good at doing it and be outsourced to.

     

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