IT Consulting in Micro Small Businesses

The micro small business is gaining popularity in the global market today. There are various types of small business that are rising. All of them have different needs & advantages .The need for IT consulting is also not the same. This article can throw some light on what is micro small business & need for consulting in micro small business

One can easily define micro small business as-The term micro business tends to better describe the smallest niche/place within the small business world. A micro business is, in general has less than ten employees & includes some unique needs to that space. It has very less number of PC hardly 5-10. It requires relatively small amounts of capital or credit financing(less than $25.000) In addition, micro small business include pert-time or self employment activities to supplement family income. It doesn’t even have a dedicated server. This clearly differentiates micro business with big IT consulting companies.

The main reason that IT consultants are required in this business is that they have one to one system. Making a career in IT consulting is not a very easy job. You can easily start your business but to get success in this business requires large contracts from big business companies. At the earliest stage people are not able to make high contacts which can win them contracts so they start their work with micro small business. There is some hardware requirement for entering into the IT consulting. You must have some knowledge about PC, support; PDAs like Window CD based PDAs, printers, modems, backups etc.

In addition to hardware requirements there are some software requirements as well that should be taken care of for micro business IT consulting. It requires basic knowledge of Windows & other operating systems. Basically they use Windows & look for heavy desktop Microsoft office support, basic notebook & PC support.

Custom Software Development

The business world is getting more technology based every second. There is no one day when we see in the newspapers about the new technologies that are coming up in the markets. These technologies are very expensive. So, the need to get the best software at the low cost prices leads to the concept of custom software development.

Today there is high competition in the market & to strive there companies have to give their best shot. Companies have to deliver the best software in the market at reasonable cost & best quality. We all know that in IT world technology changes very fast. This change, high demand of saving money & time invited the need for custom software development. Apart from these reasons the other reason for why is custom software is needed is that custom software or application software provides capabilities that are not available in simple software. Though custom software provides high end services but at the same time it need highly skilled developers who are experts in their respective fields.

Developing software before knowing the type of business is of no use. Development of quality product requires a planned & strategic approach.

There are certain requirements that should be clearly understood before you start with the software development cycle. The requirements may include:

1. Computer & Process Control Systems should be of latest technology

2. Functional requirements

3. Change control

4. Specifications

5. Timing & Delivery of validation documentation

6. Coordination of validation tests between the modules.

7. Quality of software

However, before outsourcing custom software development does some market research for the vendor & ensures that vendors understand the responsibilities of the overall process & their roles. The vendor should have an appropriate approach to complete their responsibilities & have committed the necessary resources to complete assigned activity in a timely manner. And most importantly they harbor best software development processes. Custom software can earn a company many benefits like:

Saves valuable resources like time & money

Easy to maintain

Adaptable to future changes.

User Friendly

There is no doubt the companies earn high profits because of outsourcing but to have the best companies should often obtain periodic updates on the development progress &make adjustments to plans & schedules as appropriate.

We cannot neglect the importance & demand that outsourcing software development has gained as it saves money & time. So if you haven’t outsourced any of your projects till now, then do it now & experience the difference.

TIPS TO SUCCEED ONLINE BUSINESS

Today, the presence of internet is felt in every field. It doesn’t matter what business you are involved in. Whether you are selling a product or service, your competition is hard online & you have to be the best to sell your products. Just submitting the website on the internet doesn’t mean that you will find success online. You have to do a lot of hard work to attract the customers to see what you have to offer & how they can be benefited from them.

There are certain tips by which you can hit the bull's eye-customers

1. Understand customers needs: When you begin to develop your internet presence, include some features that you know your target audience will want: some 'quick wins' to get the site up & running. For this, organizations do market research at the early stage to get indications that are likely to visit their websites. Customer is the main key for success in online business so companies should be able to give them what they expect to increase the p[popularity of their sites.

2. Offer a free Newsletter: Yes, a newsletter will take a time to put together but by offering helpful tips & resources to your readers, they will see how you are more then willing to help & you will earn their respect. A newsletter is also a great way to approach your target market. Your subscribers want to receive your newsletter so take advantage of that captive audience. A newsletter is worth a thousand words".

3. Exchange links with other websites/businesses: Find other websites that offer products, services to a similar target market as yours .Make sue the links are relevant to your business.

4. Keep your website up to date & maintained :Don’t think that submitting the website once on internet will do miracles for you in your business. Be sure to include information your customers can use & that search engines will see as new content. When search engine spider the internet to update their indexes, they will look to see how valuable your website information is & if you are willing to offer more. So, new content will attract them & your website will stay on high listings.

5.Submit your website to search engines & directories. Last but not the least submit your website in the category that matches your site. Make sure that it contains the relevant keywords to attract a large section of audience.

Online business is easy to start but to achieve success in this requires 24*7 hard work & proper market strategy. All one can conclude that online business can earn you good profits if you follow the business strategies & good customers.

Web development

Today, the World Wide Web has brought a revolution in every field, Website is a collection of pages with starting page as home page & there are various links that take you to the different pages. Companies follow different technologies for developing websites. All profit earning companies & non profit companies own their own websites. Today, a great sea change has taken place in web development. Standard compliance is the name of the game. Today websites are not only for sharing the idea at academic levels but companies are using websites for selling & buying of products.

Creating a website is not an easy task. It’s not like that once you design the page it will be approved. It requires continuous feedback from the clients & after repetitive revisions a design gets approved. While creating website one has to consider various factors-like what customer wants from the site, targeted audience etc.. Web developers should focus on customers throughout during the development process. Discover their needs & evaluate your design to ensure that those needs are met. One must test the site iteratively with representative customers to fix the bugs. What graphics should be used & the most important is the budget. Once you have created the website, your role does not end there. You have do marketing for your site so that more people visit it & you get profitable results.

At the end of the day, we can say that web developments is the task that can be performed best only by the expert web developers. Seeing the trend & demand for the web development companies have now started to outsource web development to the countries like INDIA. The reason is India has a lot of experienced web developers who develop websites at lower costs as compared to the developers in developed countries. Web development is done by using different languages like-HTML, XML, CSS, Flash etc. Today many user friendly web sites are being developed. These are developed by using JavaScript & .Net. Another web development technique that is on the peek today is AJAX.

From above, we can conclude that companies today are very keen in web development & looking India as the ultimate destination due to its high quality talent, good communication skill, technical people, lower costs & best qualities. There is no doubt that India is the largest outsourcing destination for all companies.

Outsourcing Web Design

Today, web design companies are gaining popularity in the business sectors by giving services corporate world who are interested in outsourcing their web design and development needs of projects.

Now, Companies can either hire web design companies to build websites for them or build it in house using web design software. Web design outsourcing is expensive but companies opt this because of the various reasons. The web design industry is growing at an increasingly rapid rate as more & more off line companies are placing ever more emphasis on the internet. The advantages of hiring Web design companies include:

1. Expertise: Web Design companies offer clients expertise of both computer programming & graphic design.

2. Time: Outsourcing web requirements is going to save time & effort.

3. Ongoing Support: Increasingly, web design firms are able to offer their clients ongoing design & marketing support.

4. Advice: Web designers can provide companies with informed opinions to what will work & what won't.

5. Technology: Web design companies have access to broad range of state of the art hardware & software & more significantly know what to do with it.

Although , the business of web design outsourcing is growing at a rapid rate but there are some issues due to which some companies prefer to do most of the related work in house & give only less expensive tasks for outsourcing like content writing for different stories, articles etc.

The reasons may be:

1. Cost: The web design companies are very expensive .So; the companies have to think twice before going for website design outsourcing.

2. Limited Knowledge: While web developers may know a lot about web sites, they only have a limited knowledge of your company.

3. Unbalanced Outlook: Web design companies can place too much emphasis on programming at the expense of graphic design & vice versa.

4. Risk: When companies hand over web design responsibilities, they tend to loose the element of control over the process & therefore increasing risk.

5. Content: Web designers & copyrights are unlikely to known as much about the company & therefore may not be the best source of website content.

Finally, if you outsource your site, retain control of important decisions. Don’t give a website design company complete discretion over your non profit's site-particularly over identifying the site's goals & content.

After BPO & KPO, now comes PPO

Today in the world of science & technology where IT sector has proved its milestone in Software Development & other IT services., companies are now also attracted toward the BPO, KPO & the latest PPO in the market for the business purposes.

BPO have brought a revolution in the business world. Customer call center operations in particular represent an enormous growth sector in the BPO arena, due to the substantial cost savings that companies can stand to realize. In India alone, BPO revenue-mainly from call centers operations-are forecast to grow from $2 billion in 2003 to $21 in 2008.Business process outsourcing involves the contacting out of various business functions to outside providers. And today, practically every company outsource some portion of its major business processes. And it is expected that it will continue to boom like this in the coming years as well. After the satisfying results from the business processing outsourcing, the companies thought of outsourcing high end knowledge & came a new revolution called Knowledge business outsourcing. It is one step ahead of BPO. These two are different in business, its not that only the letter is changed, the work carried out in KPO is also different. It involves high expertise professionals in particular fields having excellent logical & analytical skills. The future of KPO is very promising as it is growing its roots in fields like Engineering services, Web development application etc apart from IT & ITES.

Watching the growth & the profits earn of both the business outsourcing, and Mr. Aggrawal came up with a new wave in the business called person to person outsourcing (PPO). PPO will provide services to the individual professionals at home by the use of fast internet connection. For person to person outsourcing the individual requires only a pc & a fast internet connection. The services that can PPO can outsource include tutoring, writing, data entry, marketing, sales support n others. The revenues of PPO are going to rise from $250 million this year to $2 billion by 2015.PPO follows two business models. First model includes direct interaction takes place between the client & the vendor & a contact is signed & second model involve a subscription fees & particular revenue if the project makes up in the marketplace. PPO provides the individuals to work from home & it is increasing the employment opportunities for the people who are talented but can’t go out for work. Though it is appearing as good business field but the future will decide its fate when the exact profit details will be revealed.

Software Development Model

Software has become a part of the national infrastructure. It is the differentiating factor. Earlier the software development was personalizes but as the sophistication of applications grew, programs grew in size & complexity & maintenance became difficult. Software projects were taking a lot longer than originally envisaged. So, to overcome these pitfalls & meet the increasing competitiveness in today's business & changing business needs, companies felt the need to follow the software development models. Following are the software development models followed by all the companies today

Waterfall model: This model is also known as classic life cycle Model. It follows the documentation driven paradigm.

It is a time ordered sequence of activities called as life cycle stages. This is the most popular model.

Lifecycle Stages defined in this model are:

1. System Engineering: this stage of waterfall model focus on the following:

Decide & scope of project

Requirement gathering

Estimation

2. Software requirement analysis: Requirements are analyzed with the intention of coming up with the design of the project.

3. Design: It mainly consists of two parts:

High level design (HLD): It divides the system into logical building blocks & explains interface between them.

Detailed level design (DLD): It consists of specifications of programs along with logic.

4. Coding: Implementing the design is implemented using specific language to provide the solution of the problem.

5. Testing: It is done to check that what we have developed is what was expected.

6. Maintenance: When the system is being used in live environment, any bugs that are found will be fixed. If the business requirements change then system might need enhancements.

This model has certain pros & cons.

The main advantage of this model is its simplicity & the logical way of structuring the different activities in a software project.

The main disadvantage is it assumes that the requirements are completely ready before the design which is not the case in most of the development scenarios.

The Spiral Model: This is one of the most generic of all the models. Most life cycle models can be derived as special cases of the spiral model. It uses a risk management approach to software development & emphasizes on the need to go back & reiterate earlier stages a number of times as the project processes. This approach helps to demonstrate a proof of concept early in the cycle & it more accurately reflects the disorderly, even, chaotic evolution of technology.

It is divided into four major activities:

1. Planning: Determining objectives, alternatives & constraints.

2. Risk Analysis: Evaluate alternatives, identification & resolution of risks

3. Engineering: Development & verification of next level product.

4. Validation: Or customer evaluation is customer's assessment of results & suggested modifications.

The main advantage is it defers elaboration of low risk software elements & incorporates prototyping as a risk reduction strategy.

The disadvantage f\of prototyping is it may lead to false expectations & poor system design.

Prototyping:

Requirements are very seldom fully known at the beginning of the project, this model therefore address this fact. It starts with first building a simplified version of the system, and then seeks feedback from the different stakeholders of the project, then come up with a second better system. This cycle is repeated until all the stakeholders are completely satisfied with all aspects of the system.

There are various variations of prototyping:

1. Throwaway Prototyping Model: this is useful in proof of concept where requirements & user's needs are unclear or poorly specified. The approach is to construct a quick & dirty implementation of the system during or before the requirement phase.

2. Evolutionary Prototyping Model: This approach is used in the projects that have low risk in such areas as losing budgets, schedule predictability & control, large system integration problems or coping with information sclerosis, but high risk in user interface design.

3. Rapid Application Development Model: A variation of prototyping model is to perform RAD.RAD requires strict time limits on each phase & relies on tools that enable quick application development.

Indian IT Outsourcing

Outsourcing is the hottest topic in business, and it will likely stay that way. Person who is involved in any large business will definitely have to deal with it one day, in one way or another.

Facts reveal that India has become the leading IT outsourcing destination. Companies are now more interested in investing in India for various reasons. Some of the important reasons can be as follows.

High Quality Industrial Training: Today companies have started providing industrial training to students in their colleges to make them better professionals. NASSCOM has started campus connect programmers to achieve this goal.

Highly talented workforce: India’s population is now proving a boon to the country in terms of workforce. India has easy availability of highly qualified & experienced professionals who can play an important role in the field of IT outsourcing to India.

Lower costs: Companies can save huge amount of money in terms of infrastructure, human resources & time selecting India as outsourcing place as there is a lot of difference in the cost of living of developing & developed countries.

High Quality Standards: India assures highly quality oriented results meeting the global market standards. Today, many ISO certified & CMM5 level companies are located in cities of India. Moreover, India provides better customer satisfaction & share holder values.

Fluency in English: Today, India is having the maximum number of talented English spoken Software professionals which helps India a lot in increasing its business.

Government policies & tax system in India: India has a well organized tax system. Indian jurisdiction also plays an efficient & effective role in attracting companies to outsource in INDIA. IT government also plays an important rule in contributing a key to success in IT outsourcing by providing basic amenities

Software Outsourcing to India

Outsourcing software development has become a prominent business practice in which a company contracts all or part of its software projects to the outsourcers. Outsourcing software development has become one of the most critical topics & most widely implemented management tool for organizational change. The growing software market offers firms to recruit critical resources to develop quality software including skilled engineers to develop software efficient markets channel to distribute software, strong support from academic research centers & an active capital market to support risk. For this, India has become the largest software outsourcing hub. Currently software industry in India is estimated to be worth $1.2 billion US dollars. Many international companies like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, IT&T, Motorola, HP etc have chosen India as offshore outsourcing destination.

India enjoys the following advantages over some other nations which promote software outsourcing:

Cheap Development Cost: The development cost is relatively low. As compare to USA the overall development cost of the project in India is 50% less. This is because the difference between in the cost of living of developing & developed countries.

Highly trained & skilled personnel: India has the world's largest pool of scientific manpower. It has a growing number of more than 3.5 million tech personnel with more than 41000 IT graduated annually.

Quality: Various training programmers & certification processes ensure the quality of software personnel & services. Today many CMM level5 and ISO certified companies are located in cities of India.

State of art Technology: A survey shows more than 65% of Indian software companies use the state of the art technology in their software development process. It includes the use of Computer aided software engineering (CASE) & fourth generation Languages (4GLs) in Software development; adoption of graphical User Interface, OOP techniques etc. Acquiring high computing equipments is no longer a major obstacle for software project as the price of such equipment is going down dramatically. The declining cost of telecommunication facilities that can lower cost of delivering the programmers output to their clients around the world.

Establishing Partnership: The huge market opportunities in India are very attractive to foreign enterprises .One of the ways of stepping into the local market is to provide outsourcing projects to the local societies so that to establish a positive relationship for the further market development.

IT Consulting Roads to Success

Before knowing what all efforts are required to be a successful IT consultant, you must know what is a consultant? A consultant is generally considered a guide & assistant to an organization .Consultant have special knowledge & skills which they use to provide advice, solutions, or assistance to clients. Usually consultants, work on a contract basis rather than as employees. This infers, too, that the service consultants give is of limited duration. And IT consulting is an area which helps the companies in choosing the best resources for achieving profitable results. Now the next step includes the ways that can guide you to roads of success.

The very important challenge to start IT consulting business involves how to plan & start an Independent Consulting business. You need to make a decision whether you want to go for part time consulting or permanent one. Once making the decision, set up an office & pick up the name with a quote that can attract the clients.

Second, How to perform Problem solving & business Services. This will include tasks like-How to make proposals, negotiate contracts & set fees. The first contract is very important for nay business & the company wants to give more than what is expected from it.

The other crucial step which joins hands with the above is how to market your Information technology business. For this you have to make contacts, use referrals, Distribute brochures & networking. Try to make news releases. The other important way to get publicity is through email marketing. Getting your name entered in directories is the other good option.

The very important point to be considered after you starts providing Information Technology Solutions to your clients is “how to stay on the top technically & professionally”. You have to seriously budget out your time for this. IT consulting is very hot in the market these days. Every other person is going for this business but to be at the top requires not only the hard work but it requires what is called smart work. Watch areas that can lead you to the top. Make a list of companies which provide the same IT services & It support as yours & watch out their success rates. To give the consulting companies a tough competition select the vendors carefully may at first you may not be able to earn enough profits but once your name is famous in the market you can easily get high profits.

Last but not the least is to manage a proper balance between the personal & professional life.

Search Engines and E-Business

Search engine is loose term for several types of software, typically owned & operated by companies other than internet service providers. Search engines include millions, even billions of pages in their databases which help the customers to get the information regarding millions of products, people, places and ideas. There are over 1000 search engines, & the number continues to grow, most popular ones being AltaVista (www.altavista.com ), Google (www.google.com ) & Yahoo (www.yahoo.com).

Technology, specifically the Internet & e-business, is instrumental in changing the way we do business. E-business is the integration of a company's business, including products procedures & services over the internet. One can turn a company from a brick and mortar business into an e-business when integrate the manufacturing, finance and HR functions with sales , marketing and customer reach through an e-commerce website. E-commerce Website is the online component of an e-business. Business leaders realize that in order to maintain their competitive edge a business should try the online market place.

Amazon is a great example of a successful online marketplace. It provides a variety of books at low costs which are not easily available in your friendly neighborhood book store. E-business is not only limited to shopping only. Today, we can get our tours organized by the leading touring companies on internet only. Cox & Kings is one of the international online travel website. Similarly, number of web design and development companies are rendering real estate website design services to cater to growing housing and commercial rental needs of people worldwide.

This is where search engine come in. Popular search engines like Google and Yahoo account for more than 60% of web search by all internet users. A search engine has millions of WebPages in its database, so how do you come above the rest of websites available. It is pertinent as users may not check out a website listed on 1000 rank

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is not a term of Science but rather a term of art. Depending upon one's perspective, outsourcing may be described as allowing an external organization to control important parts of one's business or paying another to do the work that a company no longer wishes to do in-house. Outsourcing is essentially a long term relationship between a customer & a supplier. An essential feature of outsourcing is that the supplier takes the responsibility for delivering the specific range of services to the client on a contractual or permanent basis. The External Service provider that are providing the outsourcing services are third-party providers, or as they are more commonly called, service providers. Outsourcing is a way for an organization to increase its effective capacity without investing capital in facilities, machines, recruitment & training. It may also be thought of a way to enhance the organization’s competitive edge in the areas of cost, time, quality & flexibility by selecting a partner who specialize in a particular service & by developing long lasting relationship with selected suppliers.

Companies follow outsourcing model to carry out various functions, such as payroll, billing and data entry. Those processes could be done more efficiently and therefore more cost-effectively, by other companies with specialized tools and possess trained personnel.

In today’s Technological world, outsourcing takes many forms. Organizations still hire service providers to handle distinct business processes. But some organizations outsource whole operations. The most common forms are Software Development outsourcing and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

BPO encompasses call center outsourcing, human resources outsourcing etc. These deals involve multi-year contracts that can run into millions of dollars. In today’s global marketplace outsourcing has made itself accessible to many organizations on a national and international level. Software Development outsourcing can be classified as a service which allows an organization to get a third party external vendor to develop custom software application for their use.