Friday, October 19, 2007

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.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

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.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

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.

Thursday, October 4, 2007

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