Evalueserve provides services for patent writing, evaluating and assessing the commercial potential for law firms and entrepreneurs. Its market research services are aimed at top-rung financial services companies, to which it provides analysis of investment opportunities and business plans. Another major product is multilingual services–Evalueserve trains and qualifies employees to communicate in Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese and Italian, among other languages. That skill set has opened market opportunities in Europe and elsewhere, especially with global corporations.

Experts say these new trends are significant, and they will continue to grow over time. “Activities considered for ‘offshoring’ have moved up in value and begun to touch core functions, such as highly analytical processes,” says Stefan Spohr, a principal in the financial institutions group of A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm in Chicago. “More complex customer services are substituting simple data processing and call center activities.” Spohr adds that the higher-end functions being performed offshore these days include information research, financial portfolio analysis, customer data mining, statutory reporting and inbound insurance sales, among others.

. . .

Cutting costs is not the only reason why outsourcing such tasks makes sense for its clients; it’s also about higher quality of work, says Aggarwal. “Among the more unusual emerging developments is that business process offshoring is not merely a way to reduce cost by migrating core functions,” adds Spohr of A.T. Kearney. “It is also a strategic initiative to take advantage of technological advances and the human capital available offshore to fundamentally restructure an organization’s operating model.”

Evalueserve’s model works on a mixed system where anywhere between 50 percent and 80 percent of the work is handled out of an Indian facility, while the rest is done at the client’s location. For example, a patent filing assignment from a U.S. corporation may involve the Indian staff writing the patent in English or say, Japanese, and evaluating its commercial potential. But the client or its law firm would do the actual filing in the United States.

Us coders carp about outsourcing/offshoring all the time. Among other things, we always think it’s witty to suggest outsourcing CEO’s, managers, and other business positions. Well, there ya go. Yay capatalism!

Outsourcing Business

As it turns out, I can get pretty cynical about enterprise architecture. This cynicism comes from what seems to be the common life-cycle of enterprise architecture initiatives. Usually they begin in a blaze of glory and attention as the IT group launches a major initiative that will be bring synergy, reuse, and all the other benefits that can come by breaking down the stovepipes of application islands (and other suitable analogies). Two or three years later, not much has been done and the enterprise architecture group isn’t getting their phone calls returned. A year or two after that and the initiative quietly dies, but soon enough another one starts and the boom and bust cycle begins again.

So why does this cycle happen with such regularity? I think that most people involved in these initiatives would say the reason they fail is primarily due to politics – but what they often miss is that those political forces are inevitable. To succeed in these things means first recognizing the strength of those political forces.

. . .

[Duct Tape Architecture?] A good way to think about this is that these initiatives should less about building an overarching plan for applications, and more about coming up with techniques to integrate applications in whatever way they are put together. (After all ApplicationBoundaries are primarily social constructs and they aren’t likely to conform to anyone’s forward plans.) This integration architecture should work with the minimum impact to application teams, so that teams can provide small pieces of functionality as the business value justifies it. I think you also need to focus on approaches that minimize coupling between applications, even if such approaches are less efficient than a more tightly coupled approach might be.

Be sure to check out the “Patterns and Best Practices for Enterprise Integration” link.

Fowler on “Enterprise Architecture”

“I hardly think that telling people to push shift constitutes trafficking in a (copy-protection technology) circumvention device,” Halderman yesterday told US newswires. “I’m not very worried.”

Link

Microsoft does not plan to take on systems management heavyweights such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Computers Associates. But management software has become a key element of the company’s plan to convince corporate customers to base their most important systems on Windows, Hamilton said.

. . .

Microsoft’s two main management products–SMS and MOM–differ in capabilities. SMS is geared toward letting large companies distribute software updates and patches automatically to PCs over corporate networks. MOM, meanwhile, is for monitoring network events to head off problems, such as an overloaded server or dropped network connection.

. . .

With DSI, Microsoft is seeking to automate many data-center operational jobs and reduce the labor involved. The idea is that management software can be clever enough to know when a given application will have a problem and take actions to avoid it. For example, the systems management software could fire up an extra Web server when the existing machines are being overloaded because of a spike in traffic.

. . .

Central to DSI is an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based data format, or schema, called Systems Definition Model (SDM). Microsoft calls a SDM a blueprint, or description, for how software and hardware components can be controlled.

Microsoft System Management

“There are two concerns: protecting sensitive information and controlling a company’s public image,” says Debbie Weil, publisher of WordBiz Report, a newsletter for online marketers.

The Man, His Pants, and Personal Weblogs

An interesting thread: “The challenge that was given to me by several in the Windows camp was to produce evidence of a $20 million dollar business running on something other than Windows that was cheaper and more productive. Prove the cost savings and the efficiencies.”

Link via Cafe au Lait.

RDF has ignored what I consider to be the central lesson of the World Wide Web, the “View Source” lesson. The way the Web grew was, somebody pointed their browser at a URI, were impressed by what they saw, wondered “How’d they do that?”, hit View Source, and figured it out by trial and error.
—RDF.new Challange.

“social security, medicare, energy, tax relief, Education, policies, White House history, White House news, news, United States of America, 43rd President, George W., W., George W, President George W. Bush, President Bush, White House, government”

Usually, the old <META name=”keywords”/> HTML tag is used to describe what the page you’re looking at is about. Search engines (supposedly) use them for better indexing too. This META block may be old, but it’s interesting to see what keywords the White House associates itself with. Most of the Clinton Whitehouse.gov pages don’t seem to have the META tag.

rebelutionary: “I can’t say this loudly enough – hear, hear! JDOM was a great idea, that has since been surpassed.”