161–170 of 255 posts
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Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.
What makes Krakow inherently better than say, Bangalore? Not snark, just asking.
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have you been involved in many IT outsourcing agreements? Cost is always a major factor in procurement, and in IT where there can be a strong market for lemons, it's often the key factor. A company that's more expensive and can't clearly demonstrate in a bid scenario the positive impact of that increase in costs, will lose bids, a lot.
Of course cost is a major factor. I never disputed that. I'm saying that competing on price alone is undesirable for IT outsourcing companies.
Everyone will say they take security seriously, but the cost of actually doing a good job on security is much higher than paying lipservice to it, so it doesn't really make commercial sense to do it well.
In general in fact I'd say that a lot of IT outsourcing contracts tend to lead to a market for lemons. It's very hard for customer to assess the quality of a companies staff for example, so the company with the cheaper staff can afford a cheaper bid, which looks just as good as a company with more expensive staff...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
have you been involved in many IT outsourcing agreements? Cost is always a major factor in procurement, and in IT where there can be a strong market for lemons, it's often the key factor. A company that's more expensive and can't clearly demonstrate in a bid scenario the positive impact of that increase in costs, will lose bids, a lot.
Of course cost is a major factor. I never disputed that. I'm saying that competing on price alone is undesirable for IT outsourcing companies.
In the tech-related (but now fully mainstream, unlike a few years ago) news these days, there are a number of recurring themes. 1. Massive security breaches affecting major corporations, governments, and so on. 2. Massive IT outages, affecting corporations, governments and so forth. It doesn't take a lot of incidents to mark them as 'massive' since things are strongly centralized in this world. Meanwhile, in the last…
Ignoring the offshoring part of this for a moment I think you're on point about the CTOs, it baffled me too at the beginning. When I started doing sales for a startup service and was targeting CTOs I discovered based on my interactions that outside of Silicon Valley companies or obviously tech centered companies, CTOs in other countries and industries are in many cases just the usual political shark type person inter…
You didn't spam them did you?
Your description of their behaviour sounds a lot like the standard response to spammers. eg FOAD
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I don't see why an IT outsourcing company would not have the greatest incentive to take security and reliability extremely seriously. Is there anything worse for an IT service provider than being blamed for a massive IT outage at a global corporation? This is headline news. And I don't see any difficult contractual issues at all. On the contrary. A massive outage, by definition, means that the contractual obligation…
Security costs money, reliability costs money. If it's not in your contract, you don't pay for it. if there's any outage that is because the customer didn't ask you do do something that's their fault not yours. For example would you as an IT outsourcer pay for a redundant datacentre if your contract didn't call for it? Would you patch all your systems immediately even if it caused availability issues if it wasn't exp…
I would assume that the contract calls for particular service levels and that downing the entire fleet of a large carrier for days is in breach of that contract.
If the contract says "provide service X with 99.999% availability" the service provider cannot come back and say, oh but you forgot to specify that we should run a redundant data center to guarantee that availability.
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Of course cost is a major factor. I never disputed that. I'm saying that competing on price alone is undesirable for IT outsourcing companies.
But the problem is that factors like security and reliability are often invisible in outsourcing contracts, as it's very hard to specify things like security exactly in a bid contract, and very hard for customers to tell the difference between an organisation with higher security and one with poorer security practices. Everyone will say they take security seriously, but the cost of actually doing a good job on securi…
But my experience has taught me this. The vast majority of time its a fragile egg shell waiting to crack. When it fails, it fails miraculously. An IT support team on this scale is one of those things you should keep close to your product or customer.
Occasions like this I guarantee a bunch of execs somewhere in BA will pay ANYTHING to have some of their loyal IT staff back to take control of the situation.
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Ignoring the offshoring part of this for a moment I think you're on point about the CTOs, it baffled me too at the beginning. When I started doing sales for a startup service and was targeting CTOs I discovered based on my interactions that outside of Silicon Valley companies or obviously tech centered companies, CTOs in other countries and industries are in many cases just the usual political shark type person inter…
> As an example a person in a tech leader role at a major company in the UK who I thought may be interested in hearing about a product was quite rude about me never contacting them again ... You didn't spam them did you? Your description of their behaviour sounds a lot like the standard response to spammers. eg FOAD
Airlines should band together and form working group to redevelop the old system in modern open source tech. Yes it would probably take 5+ years to develop and roll out, but they can't keep maintaining these 50 year old mainframes that cost them tens of millions a year in downtime.
There are many factors that contribute to these difficulties, but tech is not near the top of the list.
There are many cautionary tales, including the $8-billion FAA AAS system rewrite failure [1].
Contributing factors include
- Regulatory processes
- Subcontracting
- Project management
- Politics and turf wars
- The extreme difficulty of reengineering a complex system when few, if any of the original designers and developers are driving it [2].
[1]: http://sebokwiki.org/wiki/FAA_Advanced_Automation_System_(AA...
[2]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/n0nud2xp2a9bxjo/Programming%20as%2...
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Why just two? The average salary in a western country is many times that in a third world country, and ten times is not that unusual.
Unless you're an idiot and outsourcing critical operations to India or China, it's more like ~4 for 1. Third world countries are developing, you should keep up with that.
I've heard rumours that the Chinese will just copy your IP as soon as possible, regardless of what you make them sign.
But what's supposed to be wrong in India compared to other outsourcing sites?