Thought Garage

The days of 'Free' Customer service looks to be over. At least a quality customer service is. This comes to me (and I am sure for most of you) as a big surprise, but I guess we all have to get used to this. Occasionally, "we've heard from customers that it's hard to understand a particular accent and that they couldn't understand the instructions they were getting," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman. So, Dell introduced a Support Service called as 'Your Tech Team' Service, that promises that Technical Experts are from North America (instead of Bangalore, India for instance) and average wait time would be less than 2 minutes. Sounds Great, finally Dell heard the Customers. Not quite. This service is not for every Dell customer that purchases a Dell product, but only for those who pay an additional $12.95 a month to receive this 'premium' service. And Dell Spokesman put a PR spin to this 'Pay if You need Good Customer Support' se...

Quite an interesting aspect of offshore outsourcing, that outsourcing may become just as natural choice as expanding business into emerging markets like China and India.  The article also discusses how traditional cheap sweatshops have become strategic partners leveraging the models that they invented for themselves. Two-thirds of companies on the InformationWeek 500 list of business technology innovators say they do offshore IT outsourcing, up from 43% in 2004. Consulting firm NeoIT estimates that 75% of the world's 2,000 largest companies are engaged in offshore outsourcing, with 20% of their IT budgets spent on offshore contracts; it predicts that could rise to as much as 40% of budgets in the coming years. Cost cutting is usually the main driver, but as companies rely ever more on foreign markets for revenue growth, they're rethinking where they want their employees, including those in IT. For Genworth's McKay, it makes sense that globalization of the IT workf...

TCS released results of a survey conducted by Dynamic Markets on behalf of TCS recently. Folks from TCS suddenly think that they uncovered something new. I am not sure I understood the revelation part of their press release. 1 in 3 companies’ IT projects fail to perform against expectations. Yet despite these worrying levels of failure to deliver, 43% of organizations say that their business managers and the Board accept problems as the norm. This attitude is especially common in Europe (44%) and Asia-Pac (48%). ( Source ) Consider the snip, I understand, released in 1995 revealing something about IT Project failures. According to the Standish Group ... ... only about one-sixth of all projects were completed on time and within budget , nearly one third of all projects were canceled outright, and well over half were considered "challenged." Of the challenged or canceled projects, the average project was 189 percent over budget, 222 percent behind schedule, and c...