Cultural Sensitization

Anyone who has been involved in offshore based outsourcing for some time, in any way, will surely have interesting stories of how lack of cultural awareness led to serious and some times just hilarious incidents. Fact of the matter is that while the common denominator that drives work to remote locations is the fact that at least in technology services, these are finally technical stuff which can be delivered by anyone technical, these closely linked to cultural aspects too.

What is not often factored in, is that these technical services are needed and provided through human interface and these provide the cultural tone to services, through the consumer or provider of these services. If there is no adequate sensitization on both or at least one side of the equation, it can often lead to misinterpretation, service deficiency or frustration. Most companies which provide offshore based services have understood this now, many the hard way, but there is still a big gap to cover and most measures are not comprehensive and do not tend to address the root cause.

Now, it is also true that it is not easy to change the cultural affiliations of people so easily and so, ultimately it comes to making people appreciate the cultural gap and having them be aware of the major socio-cultural aspects through learned behavior in an effort to match what comes naturally and effortlessly to the other party as it is part of human social and behavioral manifestation.

Bottom-line : it is very important to ensure that both enterprises and service providers appreciate this aspect and jointly work to address this in a way so that it at least neutralizes the obvious rough edges fairly consistently and is baked into the fabric of service delivery enablement. 

Making IT Work With Offshored Services

Came across this article IT Offshoring Still Works, If You're Careful which talks about what some of the companies have matured to do, in handling the offshored IT services through various service providers. 

While there is no magic potion (!), fact is that enterprises need to be cognizant of the fact that this is different from the way outsourcing worked earlier and need to make some changes in the way they structure the contract and engage with the service providers's teams. There is surely tremendous value still, provided a proactive approach is jointly taken by both sides. 

Quality Concerns with Offshore Outsourcing

Came across this article in CIO.com on the drivers of offshore based outsourcing and also what some of the respondents had to say after their experience. Clearly, service quality is an area which stands out across application services offshoring  (24%) and IT infrastructure offshoring (29%).

What this also means is that aside of the fact that a quarter to a third of the customers not satisfied with the quality of services, they probably did not put in enough measures, governance and enablers to bring this as a area for continuous performance measurement with their service providers. Clearly the service provider would be motivated to address areas that are part of their performance and since this is not being done largely, the gaps in performance are reported by so many.

Now, I am not suggesting that this is easy or that there would not have been issues, but that both sides (customer and service provider) need to acknowledge and accept this as an area of client value and put measures to track, report and action on.

This is also one of the key areas which industry needs to get into as more and more work moves outside the country from where work is being outsourced. What worked (in terms of governance and measurement) with in-shore outsourcing couple of decades back will not necessarily work with offshored outsourcing. A strong understanding of these would help enterprises engage with their service providers to ensure that the latter are driven on these areas of concerns that many have.