Synergise IT

IT outsourcing has changed the IT industry dramatically, India’s strong economic growth is partially due to the huge IT investment made by large corporations worldwide from the simple call centre operations to global development centres for IT firms. The drivers for outsourcing are simple: cost-effective, better resource management, access to special skills and allowing the company to focus more on their core business.

What people do not see very often is that setting up something like this is not cheap and risks are rather high. Its not as simple as hiring a team in India, switching on the computers and start taking calls or programming. The team has to work well with the team at the head office. There are also other risks like culture, language and political issues in developing countries. Hiring a large team also means a fixed overhead every month.

However, mass collaboration allows organisations to acquire the right talent for the right job whenever the organisation needs it and they are allowed to source such talent worldwide. Anyone in the world can work for anyone as long as both parties agree to the salary paid and the expected delivery. There are some companies like programmermeetdesigner, odesk and elance that are providing similar services where you can outsource your web design and other IT requirements to any available people.

To bring this idea to the next level, organisations can start to think about doing this internally and search for people around the world to work on the organisation’s projects, provide good money for the expected deliverable and still be able to save cost and achieve similar results from outsourcing IT work to a developing country. There can be a team of five developers from five different countries arcoss 16 time zones working on the same project with the same objective.

Collaboration tools must be developed to help in the communication and excellent communication within the team would be the main success factor for mass collaboration. I do believe this is the next big thing in IT outsourcing - without the large risks, setup costs and fixed overheads. Someone in India or China would enjoy working from home in their PJs and earning similar salaries as compared a developed nation.