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by James Robertson.
Original Post: It's the assumptions....
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The New York Times has an article on outsourcing in today's edition. It's interesting because it takes a mostly negative view of the issue from a technology standpoint. However, most of the problems with outsourcing flow from a fairly old problem in software development - ironically enough, it's well stated in this defense of outsourcing:
In the future international division of labor, Mr. Pradhan said, the production of the technology will be done in places like India, which can deliver it reliably at a low cost. What cannot be sent to India, he said, is the invention of new business processes and technologies.
Conceiving inventory-management software that helps a retailer make the best use of electronic product tags, for example, might be something best done by system designers in the United States working closely with the retailer. Once such a system and its tasks have been mapped out, though, the software code could be written by programmers in India.
And boom, we've fallen into a management rahole and we can't get up. The rathole? Thinking that we can specify the software, throw the requirements over the wall, and then get something useful back later. This doesn't work well at all, and it doesn't matter whether the requirements are tossed over the wall to the local IT group or over the wall to Bangalore - the problem is the assumption that such a process can work. We have decades of experience with this kind of thinking, and anyone who's been paying the least bit of attention has noticed that it doesn't work well. I think I'll be wary of any project I hear of that comes from these guys - where Mr. Pradhan is a Senior VP. if they are promoting rocket scientists like that to senior VP slots, the very last thing they should be allowed near is important software systems...
That's hardly the only problem. Back in tech bubble of the late 90's, a lot of big companies brought in armies of consultants to help them build systems. The thinking seemed to be that the entire problem was that the consultants from (insert large consulting firm here) were too expensive. Guess what - that wasn't what the problem was. The problem was actually a lot simpler - these firms were farming out work to a horde of people they didn't know, but who were sold to them as experts. Did they understand the business domain? Typically not. Did they know the actual user base? Typically not. So now what are these same firms doing? Farming work out to a horde of people they don't know, but who are sold to them as (inexpensive) experts.
There's a saying that Insanity is doing the same thing over again, but expecting different results. Well, here are a bunch of large firms, doing exactly the same thing they did in the 90's - sure, it will cost less - but the results are looking to be about the same. It shouldn't be a surprise - the issues are all the same, only now there are additional issues of language and cultural barriers (not to mention time zone!) to boot. Expecting different results is just... stupid. Outsourcing software jobs is going to go about as well as hiring the expensive folks from (insert large consulting firm here) did. The only question is how the failures will get spun this time
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