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Offshoring ist den Kinderschuhen entwachsen

May 4th, 2011

Die Vergabe von IT Aufträgen in Länder mit einem tieferen Kostenlevel (Offshoring) hat einen schweren Stand. In den vergangen Jahrzehnten wurde diese attraktive Möglichkeit für Kosteneinsparungen und für die Überwindung lokaler Produktionsengpässe vielfach genutzt und ausprobiert. Der Mangel an Erfahrungen auf beiden Seiten hat zu vielen negativen Erfahrungen geführt, so dass heute fast jeder eine Story zu bieten hat, wieso die Finger von diesem Modell zu lassen sind.

Diese Zeiten sind vorbei. Offshoring ist den Kinderschuhen entwachsen und mit den richtigen Partnern ist es ein Kinderspiel, Riesenschritte vorwärts zu machen.

Bei Innovaluetech vereinen wir die Erfahrung von über 10 Jahren mit Projektmanagement von international geführten Projekten. Wir haben die Lernkurve hinter uns und bieten eine Struktur, um unseren Kunden einen kosteneffizienten, qualitativ hochstehenden und effektiven Service zu bieten.

Die Hauptgründe für den Misserfolg vergangener Tage lassen sich in 3 Bereiche zusammenfassen: Kommunikation, kulturelle Unterschiede und Qualitätsgefälle:

Kommunikation:
Durch Zeitverschiebungen, Sprachbarrieren, fehlende persönliche Kontakte wurde die Vermittlung von Anforderungen und die laufenden Koordination von Projekten zu erheblichen Komplikationen und Mehraufwand und damit zu Überforderung der Beteiligten und zu Qualitätseinbussen.

Kulturelle Unterschiede:
Das Nutzerverhalten, die Prozesse, das visuelle Verständnis, das sind alles Punkte, bei welchen es von Land zu Land unterschiedliche Standards geben kann. Diese werden in der Spezifikationsphase oft automatisch vorausgesetzt und verursachen im späteren Projektverlauf Komplikationen und Mehrkosten.

Qualität
Auch hier gibt es verschiedene Anspruchsstandards, welche sehr schwer und langsam zu vermitteln sind. Dazu kommt, dass auf der Offshore Seite oft ein untransparentes Leistungsprofil und viele Änderungen in der Teamstruktur vorhanden waren.

Bei Innovaluetech haben wir die Lösungen, um diesen Schwierigkeiten zu begegnen:

1) Projektmanager mit Brückenfunktion
Wir haben eine Projektmanagerin, welche in beiden Kulturen verwurzelt ist. Sie ist in Indien aufgewachsen und lebt seit mehr als 5 Jahren in der Schweiz. Sie übernimmt sowohl die wichtige kulturelle “Übersetzung” zwischen Kunde und Entwicklungsteam als auch die Spezifikation und Koordination der Projekte.

2) Projektmanager/Single Point of Contact auf Offshore Seite
Auf Seite des Entwicklungsteams gibt es pro Projekt einen dedizierten Projektmanager, der seinerseits eine Koordinationsrolle einnimmt mit dem lokalen Team. Somit ist Konsistenz und Qualität gewährleistet.

3) Eigenes Team mit bewährten, erfahrenen und konstanten Kräften
Innovaluetech ist Mehrheitsinhabers des Offshore-Entwicklungsteams und hat somit wichtige Steuerungs- und Einflussmöglichkeiten. Die Zusammensetzung, die Ausbildung und der Zusammenhalt des Teams werden seit Jahren erfolgreich gefördert.

4) Klare Prozesse und Strukturen
Die standardisierten Prozesse und der Einsatz geeigneter technischer Hilfsmittel ermöglichen einen effizienten Ablauf und eine saubere Koordination. Dies bekommt auch der Kunde zu spüren, welcher eng in den Prozess miteingebunden wird.

Mit diesem System kommen die gewünschten Vorteile von Offshoring voll zum tragen: eine preiswertere Produktion und ein flexibles Resourcen-Management.

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Posted in CMS, Dubendorf, Fallanden, Ipad Apps, Iphone Apps, Offshoring, PHP, Switzerland, Uster, Web Development | No Comments »

Iphone and Ipad apps opportunity: My Thoughts

June 16th, 2010

I think the Iphone and Ipad Apps market is changing and changing very fast. We had first wave and then the IInd wave. The IInd wave is going to finish soon. This made the Iphone apps development market interesting at the time.

The first wave was anybody who could spend time on SDK and could come out with an App had downloads which were beyond the imagination of the developer. Lot of people made money and there was actually nothing to loose.

The IInd wave comprised of number of companies wanting to have an App because it was becoming fashion (remeber those early Web development days.. hmm like in 96 or something). People trying to improvize on the concept and see the value from the customers point of view. Customers are not expecting whole lot because Iphone is still a toy. But there is a breed of developers or companies who really started moving ahead of the curve. GPS Motion, Whats app and one of the Football app my husband showed me were some cool examples. Those people started pricing those apps reasonably and had very good response.

Now things are chaging even more. Lots of people appraoch me with the idea of Iphone App. some offer partnerships as well. Some people really excited about it. I am not convinced. When you read about one fo those success stories in an online article and it says two Harvard students built an app bla bla and had 200K downloads. Math runs through and one feels even I can do it. I think this is rubbish.

The new Iphone and Ipad app need to conider following:
1. The device in the market are growing at an unprecidented rates. In Switzerland number of Iphone and Ipad at end of 2010 might flirt with a Million mark. This is not the biggest market by any parameter other than penetration rate.
2. The apps in the future will be sophisticated. They will not only cover the need they are addressing but much more. The user interface has to be much better and the functionality has to be really good.
3. The app needs to leverage the core advantages which the Iphone offers, like Geotagging, alerts, share etc.Create a task and collerate with people or have stock price and have alerts or analysis including news and price trends. The customer should not be needed to hunt for these features, it should be just available.
4. The scale has grown. The development has to be more intentive and professional to create a better product. Right kind of experience and skills should be the basic ingredents as far as resources are concerned. The days are gone for novice programmers. Though one in million idea concept will exist.
5. The App should be marketable. Still there is need of much better apps. I still struggle to find a good app for expense management or project/task management or even Jobs. There are 100s of apps in these area but they are all apps where you need to learn to hunt the information. In amarket like Switzerland one should look for 10000+ downloads to even make a small mark. Having said that if you sell even 1000 or 2000 getting to 10000 could only be matter of weeks in not days.

So while the Iphone application development is changing I am still enjoying number of projects in this area. Hopefully I will be associated with benchmark Swiss Iphone or Ipad app soon.

Contribute your ideas or contact for more details.

Thanks
Sumati Pareek

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Posted in Dubendorf, Fallanden, Ipad Apps, Iphone Apps, Switzerland, Uncategorized, Uster, Web Development | 1 Comment »

Next Generation Web Ideas

November 17th, 2009

Are you looking at re-doing your Web presence? If you have done your website before a year or more than it is really a time to have a relook. I have made some suggestions on what are the changes you should look for?

Web Layout or Design:
I strongly recommand a comment form or search form design or layout for your website. It is cool and gives the feeling of modern look. Webistes should be only forms. You’ll see lot of industry leaders recomand it strongly.

Wider Browser Support:
One of the major changes has been the brwoser market place. 2-3 years back it was all internet explorer 6, all over the game. But now you have resonable number of Firefox, Chrome or Safari (Mac). Try to make it mobile friendly as well. As many people now a days browse the website on mobile.

Mobile search
We have more than 600,000 Iphone user. It would be safe to say that soon we will have more smartphone user than non-smartphonse users. Mobile search on smartphones like BlackBerry , iPhone, HTC, Windows, Andrioid is already change web marketing and business. Mobile apps on these platforms are something you need to look at for information in your website.

Semantic SEO
Next generation SEO keeps in mind semantic technology. Which mean you as search engine understanding the meaning instead of just counts or links. This will bring about a significantly better user experience. It might be a search engine that soon everybody will add to hers or his site or another kind of add on. You should finally get traction here. Rankings and PageRank will finally go the way of hits. Serious webmasters will care less and less for them and focus on real website success metrics.The value in SEO will outdo old school SEO tricks. Content creation, social networking and reputation building will be key more than ever. The tasks of SEO will shift from programming, website tweaking.

Social Media and Blogging trends
Blogging a Must
In past you had to convince people in business to blog but in coming times blogs will be standard and those not having one will simply fall behind. With social media and blogs being even on the forefront of most successful media campaigns like presidential campaign and large businesses. Business owners who are just aware of the Internet solely offering storefronts and static pages full of corporate and sales gibberish will lose.

Bloggers get yoursefl a life!!
This is what we said in the past and we see it happening now. With the increasing professionalism, stress and market creash, low advert revenues etc as well the danger of being sued or even jailed for blogging, bloggers will start organizing and strike back.

Social media measurements
When we do any traditional activitiey with a customer we first think can we measure the effect? The think has outgrown anything in my business. The ways to relationship and social activities measurement will finally come up. Social media influence and success will become measurable and thus make short term tactic like link baiting less attractive than long term engagement. The technology has already been patented and several solutions are being prepared.

Social web has grabbed it all
You will stop going to sites with bagage or biased opinions and pools or even recomandations. When large XYZ sites says it you ready it and get influence. But when an unknown user in different part of the work talks about the it, you just get it in your head. The approach is now more syncronized. Blog on your website can be quoted on facebook. What does that mean? You won’t have to submit to Digg, you’ll become automatically popular on Microblogging Buzz or elsewhere due to tweeting or something else in making?

S-commerce
Socail media and blogs will totally influence the decision of the internet users and purchases. It will be the primary driver. Think of facebook influence or blog you read or write the review for products or services. Same applies to your website as well.

Soft and smooth marketing.
Finally we realise you can slap someone to get the attension to say buy my product. How can you? Traditionally when we did intrusive marketing, we actually did exactly same. Now we will be more prefessional. We would like to have permsisisionotherwise you are just annoying your customer and unable to get the message through. Now, non-intrusive marketing will be more and more providing information you need, where and when you need it in enchating ways. Am I think about socail web again or a mobile app?.

Combination of CRM, Web Analytics and SEO
CRM has grwon tremendously in Education, Services and selling space. Already services and apps like Google Analytics combine gives you much more and easy control on Web Analytics. Other advance tools, costing not even a dime tie customer relationship management with web analytics and SEO. If you are not doing it, you are making your web presence die.Please don’t lose it out to competition because they are doing it.

Social media strategy
While social media still is regarded by some new to it as the quick drop in and shout place most marketers have by now noticed that it does not work that way. Yes, instead of short sighted push tactics you need a long term social media strategy which pulls your customers and makes them embrace you for the value you offer.

Look East for business
Due to the market crash, growing local markets in east and countries like India, China and Brazil catching up we’ll see products geared towards other audiences than us. Prepare new language versions or cultural influences for your site, if applicable.

Software
Cloud computing and integration
Cloud computing will change the way companies operate in their networks. I am for some of the processes in my company using google apps. I see the product and market maturing. logging 100 times a day on 20 different pages will be a thing of past, sooon.

Application portability
Application in the next generation will be hugely poartable. The new portable solutions which enable clounds, social and symentic web apps to access and transport data between different web services, like talk to each other.

In case I forgot something important, whiich I am sure I have, please add it. Send me a comment or email. In case you disagree with please let me know why. I like people challanging the thought process. What are your hopes for near future? What you expect will happen anyway?

My name is Sumati Pareek. I work and live in Fallanden, Zurich, Switzerland. I am a freelance Web Designer a developer. I like to help small and medium enterrpises with support of Web infrastructure management, new development projects in Web or Mobile development. Feel free to contact me.

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Posted in CMS, Dubendorf, Fallanden, Grifensee, PHP, Sumati Pareek, Uster | No Comments »

Skills and Labour in Relevance to Outsourcing

September 28th, 2009

It is been quite some time that I wrote. Busy bringing up the new borne. She is 7 months now. I can’t believe it myself.

Well have been interacting with some people here in Zurich, Switzerland and around. Even in my own community in Fallanden. People get the impresssion that Outsourcing as a concept is about doing something cheap. It is pretty much like getting cheap labour. People now have this mindset and I am sure that for lot of other industry it might well be true. I am not an expert in other industry but in the Web Development, or Web Design I think it is now very unfair to think like that.

If you look at it, now a decent Web Page takes numerous technologies to build. You might use Java Scipt, Ajax, Joomla, PHP, ROR, SQL any other Database or thousands of other technology to build it. The people who are doing it can’t be the labourers. You ahve the constantly upgrade your technology. Realign the focus of the work based on emergence of technology, upgrade yourown mind sets and that of the working team you have. All this on top of learning the new technology and its applications. It is cruel to term is as Labour.

I would call it Skill. So you have rocking engineers in USA, in India in very same ways as the the outsourcing companies located next door in Schwerzenbach or Uster having the skills and knowledge. The whole concept and process of outsourcing is about finding the right skills and when you do that from within the company or within your country or region or globally you have lot of other benefits to looks at. Better Skills, good quality and then the efficeincy in terms of costs could be very obvious expectations.

If you have to change the flat tyre of your car and choice is between TCS (TCS.CH) I would say TCS would be much better quality and the guy who comes knows the things really right and believe it or not if your hour is worth even CHF30 like me, the TCS guy would be far more efficient (he would do it in 25% of the time).

Got a call, will write more in this space.

Sumati

PS: I am web development freelancer based out of Fallanden, Switzerland. I can help you do a personal, Professional or a corporate website with cide use or PHP, CMS, Flash or any other relvant Web Technology.

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Posted in CMS, Dubendorf, Fallanden, Grifensee, PHP, Sumati Pareek, Switzerland, Typo3, Uster, Web Development | 4 Comments »

WebSite Development in Switzerland

July 5th, 2009

The Web development generally is changing very fast.

Remeber those days of HTML sites and then came the bigger and better applications with LAMP or Linux, APACHE, MY-SQL, PHP dominated the web development world for more than half a decade. But I feel that web is a very different landscape then the traditional Enterprise Applications space.

In traditional space you still can choose to nurture or keen running on a lagacy systems with colbol interface for last 30 years. As an enterprise you don’t have a market pressure to move to the newer technologies.

Web that ways is vers different. It create a reputation for you and is a major source of information distribution to number of entities like Customers, Employee, investors, general people etc. But also like an old  enterprise applications you can manage a process here.

The new wave of Web2.0 and Web 3 now is totally changing the way the people look at the web and get the information. Largest of the company now a days have to change the Web stategy on a constant basis. Lot of SME are emeerging fast and big because they can manage it better than some large companies.

The Web Development and potential in Switzerland is very specilized. People need multilingual support and the technology stacks, though is same, people like to go via a web agency. The quality of work and project management and coordination is expected to be bext, much more different that a typical US and UK market. The sub tools used here like, CMS are also bit different.

I have worked on number of projects here a freelancer. I enjoy it because customers are more demanding and much more systematic in the approch, requirement phase, testing etc. Not all the project experiences have been positive but it goes, (I mean like in German, Es gehts).

I continue to do more work in Flash, Typo3, Joomla or Drupal, and traditinal PHP, MYSql. Revamping the website is also on cards.

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Posted in CMS, Dubendorf, Fallanden, MYSQL, Offshoring, PHP, Sumati Pareek, Switzerland, Typo3, Uster, Web Development | 1 Comment »

Business Intelligence Challenges

June 1st, 2009

For any BI Manager the million dollar question today is what should be the key focus areas and short/long term strategy as far as business intelligence and Data Warehouse is concerned.

I worked in my previous job in Oracle and before that on the consulting side and then last two assignements have been more in the corporate side, leading the BI efforts. The common challanges are

1. Very fragmented approach to BI. Operation wants to do its own stuff and Marketing, Risk, Finance have there own reporting and analytics platforms. So on and so forth..

2. No real understanding of BI. Often, difference level of understanding. Some people wants to have a sleek metadata layer for adhoc analysis and some don’t have clue. They always want the raw data to be extracted in text file and then creatse series of excel on top to generate excel based dashboard. Both think they are right, after all excel is user friendly.

3. What is the purpose and application of the platform? See the challanges get more and more challenging like: What do you need a specific report? Is it really a part of decision support, if yes for what? Are you looking at the right number for the specific decision or do you need to look at the something different? Do you know how to interpret the numbers?Do you know if there is need of extra piece of analysis to further explore the problem, solution or simply the analysis?  

4. How do I integrate the application and BI platform: Integration is really large number of verticals to take care of . Right from Management to convince them on ROI, to user to use them effectively, to IT to take care of operations issues efficeintly, to PMO to keep doing new projects, to technology to ensure you are using right versions and right kind of tools. So on and so forth

So on and so forth, and you feel let it be (thank you Beetle). Thats the was it has to go. 

I fee that for you as BI manager, if a lot of these questions appears to be challenges and you think let it be, then you need to redraw your strategy. Some other day on some other post, I’ll try to write solutions as well.

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Posted in Business Performance management, Offshoring | No Comments »

Outsourcing Primer

March 6th, 2009

Outsourcing or also called as  offshoring is a very popular concept these days. Till a few years ago it used to be a very specialised process, usually practised by large mutlinational companies. The main purpose of Offshoring or outsourcing coule be many.

Offshoring or outsourcing could be for the purpose of reducing the cost. But in my opinion it is not the main driver. These days it is difficult to find the resources and the technological or manufacturing has become so specilised that at times it is difficult to find the resources or technology. Outsourcing and offshoring offers you to get the process handled with the most experienced and experts from around the world. It can be managed in such a way that it saves costs as well. This is one of the main benefits of globalisations.

Offshoring and outsourching in Information technology is one of  the key to the success of all the large organizations. I think their is not one in the top 500 companies of the world which doesn’t have some or the other process outsourced.

We at Innovaluetech based in fallanden, Zurich, Switzerland are engaged with some of our customers in setting up teams and projects in India. Here is how we work

1. Evolve Partnerships: In the current scenario companies using partnerships to innovate are doing well. For example, they figure out how collaboration can help them achieve the level of technological goal and improve the business position, and organize themselves to work effectively with partners. If you look at the large companies within Switzerland or Globally you will appreciate how much time and effort these companies put into getting better at collaborating, especially in the area of technology. We offer help to the Small and Medium Enterprise to achieve the very same in a efficient manner.
2. Collaborative Capabilities: Unlike the many companies that treat collaboration as a form of outsourcing, successful firms make significant investments to develop their collaborative capabilities—for instance, by experimenting to learn what processes and practices work best or by selecting a new partner in order to tap its broader experience of cooperating with others. We have worked on numerous projects with Swiss companies and offer this learning and experience to the SME companies.

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Posted in Offshoring | 2 Comments »

Business Intelligence: Basic Bla Bla

March 5th, 2009

Business intelligence (BI) as the name reflects, is gathering the intelligence or essential information about the current state of business.  In any mid size or large company the information is gathered and stored in multiple systems. Example: Financial Systems, Transactional Systems (like authorization system for cards or Switches and Billing Systems for Telcos), Operational Systems like Call center applications, Risk Systems, Marketing and CRM systems so on and so forth.

The approach of business intelligence first focuses on integrating the information which could be intelligence in a single platform. Sounds logical and simple, some time it coule be very complex. The design of storing the information at one layer itself is bit complex. But this is more like the Data Layer and more often the Data Warehouse is used for the purpose.  

Having understood these, we go a level above to discover the need for retrieval of information. Now providing this information to business solves the purpose of gathering the information itself. Read the BI Challenges to know more about this.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

I have been in project which are essential in terms of statuatory audit process of reconciliation of key ledger account from the OLTP systems to maintain the SLA with external customer to improving the performance of a dpeartment, in some cases directly responsible for increased customers or increased sales, having ROI of upto X hundred %, all of it is Business Intelligence.

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Posted in Business Performance management, Offshoring, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Technology and Marketing

February 17th, 2009

Dear Friends,

I wanted to discuss the fast changing landscape of  marketing. Coming with the similar background it is very fascinating for me to see the lanscape changing so fast.

Well I agree, we live in the times when everything around us is changing very fast. People say there is big climate change going on, we think out eaconomic systems are chaging at a very rapid pace, the lifestyle of people is changing so on and so forth.

Marketing and its ability, the way it is done and the way people percieve it is also chaging very fast. It is still about the four Ps of marketing, Product, Place, Price and Promotion but this is bevaing very difference when you consider the communication angle to it.

The marketing has become far more technology intenstive in last 10 years. I am talking about 10 years because this is the time I have spend in Technology and Businesses. The key component of marketing are highly influenced by technology. I’ll try to summarise it in brief:

Targetting the product in today’s world is highly planned and is often managed using mutliple facets of technology. For example using traditional techniques like direct marketing is a hugle technology driven process, right from selecting the right people to target to measuring the performance of campaign. The new age communication is leveraging the web, blogs and now even social networking channels for effective communication and target marketing.

Your current product portfolio management is largely dominated by measurement. Measure the success, effectiveness and contribution value of the product. It decide the key strategy around the product life cycle. Lot of large companies use Business Intelligence to track the protfolio activitiy and contributions by product and try to alter the strategy around it. An effective product stategy is supported by effetive analytics and measurement behind it.

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Posted in Business Performance management | No Comments »

Hello world!

February 16th, 2009

Welcome to InnoValueTech Blog.

Blogging as I understand is kind of online journal. But we had journals for decades, if not centuries. How is it different?

First point, it is an online tool so it you don’t have to be a literary professor from Cambrige or Oxford. So it is not about writing skills but it is more about what you are writing. Ideas and quality of ideas, interpretations and value of interpretations, contributions and type of contributions. Okay, so here we are talking about the possibility of commenting and discussing, choosing the people who needs to get involved and administering what they can express. Used nicely it can be a gold mine of ideas, which when expored more, explands more, unlike the actual gone mine.

So here we do. Feel free to blog on my blog..

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