How to outsource?

How to outsource your IT work to an Indian Company without meeting them?

Indian offshore companies are considered a viable outsourcing option today. What they offer is a strategic initiative to cut costs and access to intellectual capital not available in-house. Virtual Web companies are a natural outgrowth of the omnipresence of the Internet. But is the company just a web page or does it comprise a team of people who follow established processes and possess infrastructure?

The Trend in Offshore Outsourcing

Companies are beginning to look to the emerging Internet Information Technology Services from Offshore Indian companies for help with everything from strategy development to interactive marketing to application development and integration.
India has become the leader in offshore contracting services (India owns around 80 percent of this market) because of -

• A highly trained work force
• Low labor costs
• Appreciation for software development disciplines
• A widespread use of the English language

The Need to Evaluate

The content of the Internet is very diverse and it is necessary to evaluate what you find. Especially when it relates to appraising a "Virtual" company that one may never meet face to face. When outsourcing something as critical as IT operations and services it is important to form a "sourcing-alternatives" team to evaluate potential IT partners and determine what role each of the partners would play.

The job of translating the information to end products still takes place in a brick and mortar office where real people work. When the partners' roles and their scopes are defined ambiguously, network deadlines cannot be met and end products may not meet set quality standards.

It is vital to select the right and capable vendor to ensure the success of your project. This will ensure that you get the best services or output for your money (on hardware and software), effort and time spent as these are the most important information resources in an organization.

Enterprises evaluating virtual vendors for business projects are faced with difficult choices. The market is full of claims by many companies promising that they "do it all" and will deliver the enterprise into the E-business economy. Most do not have the breadth of skills necessary to develop and support the overall e-business needs of traditional enterprises.

The dotcom meltdown that happened a few years ago proved that most of the virtual companies though claiming to be up to any challenge, did not have the business model or the capability to deliver. Validating a company's claims can therefore not be overemphasized.