Selective sourcing

Many companies are outsourcing their IT departments to have more focus on their core competency. However, having a small IT dept. is not so expensive but they prefer to omit the risk of an additional department in their business by outsourcing that to an expert company. This kind of outsourcing has been named selective sourcing and many companies are implementing such outsourcing strategies for different departments of their firm.

Selective sourcing provide a dynamic business atmosphere, where the most updated infrastructures and software are available for the firm for the tasks which are not their core competency.

outsourcing and expectation management

Business success relies on decision making process, and one of the most important decision making processes is choosing an outsourcing partner. Outsourcing is happening in almost all companies such as manufacturing companies, financial and fiduciary companies. During an outsourcing contract there are too many unknowns which we cannot control all of them, and, as we discussed in panels, one of the keys to have a right decision is expectation management. However, expectation management brings reality into the contact but we should not lower our expectation too much that affect the business process.
Then there should be a balance between expectation and reality in an outsourcing contract.

Crowdsourcing

The great source of unemployed educated people, who are looking forward to making money is becoming a hot trend in e-business field. Many companies are trying to coordinate their high volume transaction processes through this new kind of outsourcing. For example, there are many people in internet who know two languages and many companies can translate their documents by using this great source of translators. Appearance of Facebook, Twitter, and Google search make this task much easier and people and companies can find each other much easier. Sharing a request for an specific application by a company and getting the best result with minimum payment in the minimum time, is one of the biggest advantage of this new trend.

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Smart strategic outsourcing:

During past decade, the recent economic crisis has resulted in an overall reduction of manpower and the loss of key technologists. Many companies offshored their technical tasks to reduce the manpower cost. Equipment companies are being forced to come up with innovative ways to cut the costs and speed up the time for new tool development. In such a critical situation smart outsourcing is an important way to reduce the risk of technology loss. If a company outsource the core competency jobs they will suffer from new competitors after a few years, because the outsourcing companies can enter to the market as a new brand with all transferred technologies.

Determining the kind of company that you want to form a strategic alliance with it, you have to take care of the type of tasks you are assigning for that company. For example if you are outsourcing manufacturing part of a part to different companies, it might not be necessary to give all detail of the drawing and analysis to them. The only thing that they need to know is to how make that specific part of you part. 

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Offshoring and Outsourcing Controversy

Offshoring of technical and research service jobs arose a new debate field in the US. Many of the high-payment, professional and technical positions, has recently been offshored. However, minimum cost is obtained by these offshoring programs but offshoring these technical fields may have potentially serious consequences for America's long-term national competitiveness. The business strategy of offshoring firm research and development (R&D) activities of critically important industries may result in lack of knowledge in the US in the long term. Offshoring high tech tasks like high tech manufacturing processes or researches may weaken the inside companies and may result in dependency on other countries in some technological areas for the US in a long term perspective. Consequently, during designing an offshoring or outsourcing program many technological aspects should be considered and they should be designed based on long term strategic planes for the firm and the country.

Disater Plan Terminology

In a disaster plan the standardization play an important role. Standardizing software, hardware, and procedure is required to maximize the efficiency of a disaster plan. The importance of standardization can be discussed as follows:

• Standards can keep disasters from happening.  Having the same standards for different planets can help to locate an issue more faster and a uniform platform can help to have a better troubleshooting process.
• Standards ensure that during a disaster the recovery plan will execute perfectly: Instructions in a standard ensure that during recovery and emergency condition the operator can do all tasks perfectly. For instance in standard of recovery plan it is pointed out that where is backup file, how it should be ran. In this way the recovery would be implemented with minimum risk of error.

However, having the same (compatible) wireless devices, besides a safe copy of all important documents is required in a disaster pal, we should not forget the importance of data security. Having all important data in a backup device should be implemented in a way to satisfies the security criteria too. One may encrypted all the data in the backup version to keep them secure. 

Knowledge netwrok: a consulting tool versus controling agent

This blog is about how a firm should use a knowledge management network. Knowledge network should not be used in a way that make our employees to use it as a "Black box". In other words, almost all firms need employees with high ability of thinking and having powerful skills in decision making. If people just rely upon a few post on a knowledge management network without the power of analyzing those piece of information, the firm would encounter with difficulties. The most efficient knowledge network includes knowledge objects which help knowledge workers to think better and help them to perform very well in a difficult decision making process.