IBM Updates Free Symphony Suite

For those of you who like to try low-cost (or no-cost) alternatives to Microsoft Office, you might want to try IBM's free Lotus Symphony suite.  IBM released an update to this suite yesterday, though it is still in beta testing.

Insourcing? Now There’s a Concept!

Here’s something interesting.  I was just reading a blog article written by a guy named Munjal Shah, the CEO of a company called Riya.  In this article he describes setting up an office in Bangalore, India, in 2002 for a company called Andale, “because,” as Shah explains, “India provided us with a less expensive pool of talent than Silicon Valley did.”

This is the same, very familiar reason given in recent years by countless companies for their need to control costs by outsourcing their IT work to overseas markets.  But guess what.  If Riya serves as any sort of useful barometer of the outsourcing situation, then that tide may be turning.

Here are a few excerpts from Mr. Shah’s article:

Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy.  To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first 5 years of his career to get from 1% to 10% of his equivalent US counterpart.  He then jumped from 10% to 20% of his US counterpart in the next 1 year.  During his time with us (less than 2 years) he jumped to 55% of the US wage.  In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75% just to “keep him at market.”

[. . .]

However, this huge run up in the wages has destroyed the ROI I referred to earlier.  So today we decided to consolidate all of our engineering and research efforts back to our HQ in California.  We are relocating many of our key folks back to the US, but there are some that we are not bringing back.  Our goal was to keep the payroll costs the same before and after the move. Because wages are still higher in the US we couldn’t bring everyone.

Interesting turn of events, is it not?  It brings to mind the efficient market theories and visions of the ol’ inverse supply and demand curves, establishing market equilibrium, that I had to burn into the grey matter in Economics classes.

Articles such as this one are quite welcome and encouraging to out-of-work IT people in the States, among whom I am one (although I did have what I thought to be a productive interview today; we shall see where it leads).

A Balanced View of Technology

I was just reading an interesting blog post at NBRI called 5 Factors That Affect Your Employee’s Productivity.  The 4th item on the list, entitled “It’s the Tech Tools, Stupid,” starts off by stating: “All the feel-good, psychological methods of improving employee productivity are great, but they’re useless without the right tools. And the right tools mean the right technology.”  As a techie guy myself, I couldn’t agree more.  Technology is advancing so rapidly nowadays that it has become a challenge not to fall behind, and I think good management understands this.

As always though, it’s a question of balance.  Obviously management cannot simply give a perpetual blank check to the I.T. dept., but at the same time it must constantly make sure their competitors are not outpacing them due to their own outdated technology.  This can become a problem where management presonnel must rely on the I.T. personnel to keep them apprised of current technology needs vs. wants and where the I.T. personnel have a hard time making that distinction.  Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s better.  (As I write this it occurs to me that I’m typing on a laptop computer I bought in 2000 and that is running Windows 98; it serves its purpose well in that for which I use it.)

Anyway, it is food for thought, and that blog post was an interesting read.