We’re working with one of our oldest clients to rethink the way the businesses track and manage sustainability efforts.  Here’s a sneak peak.

I’ll be speaking on a panel held by Stanford professors Richard Dasher for his course “Technology Strategies in Asia Business” on October 1st.

The panel is titled “Managing outsourced R&D in India”, and I’m excited to be joined by Avinash Agrawal (Sun/Stanford) and Bill Ihrie (Intuit).

The class is open to the public – here’s what I know so far:

October 1, 4:15 – 5pm

I’ll update the exact location as soon as I have it.

I’m thinking about rocking my Jahvid Best jersey to the panel. Go Bears.

Make no mistake: a well-qualified offshore IT team can save your startup thousands of dollars and speed up product launches.   All you have to do is find the right partner.

Easier said than done.  It’s hard enough to find good employees and vendors in your own country; how do you find a good team abroad?

It isn’t difficult to figure out where to look.  These days, websites like oDesk and eLance connect you to independent contractors around the world; simple Google searches and directory sites like IndianBusiness list thousands of IT companies in a wide variety of niches.

But knowing how to look is much more important.  So, here are five rules to keep in mind when searching for the ideal offshore IT partner.

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Video from my conversation with Lakshmi Pratury at the Aicon Gallery in Palo Alto last year.  We discuss how Monsoon Company got started, innovation in India, and Thomas Friedman.

Monsoon Company collaborated with US News and HP to create a touch-centric Adobe AIR application for America’s Top 100 Colleges. The application provides a fun, interactive way to discover the best National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges.

Being a boutique consultancy that is focused on touch software, we are always excited to see how touch is evolving in education and e-learning amongst other verticals!

Get the US News app here.

Until recently, I often wondered if the cluttered, loud websites that dominated Indian cyberspace were indicative of a cultural difference in design aesthetics.

Although I knew that the average Indian consumer doesn’t want every pixel on their screen to be blinking or covered with Bollywood gossip, I thought that maybe they had more of a tolerance for it.   In making Indian websites louder and busier, perhaps Indian designers were reacting (or overreacting) to what their audience wanted?

This was exciting to me, because it meant that a competing design sensibility could emerge from talented agencies in Mumbai and Bangalore.   Indian web design could emerge as a wholly distinct movement and compete with the current standard of minimalism synonymous with Web 2.0.

Alas, I was wrong.  With the clean, sensible redesign of the Hindu, it seems that Indian brands are moving towards the Western standard.  There will be no Indian web design movement for now.

On the bright side, reading Indian news no longer makes me want to hide under my desk in fear of clashing colors and flashing banners.

This is the first post in a series about the advantages of global collaboration (beyond the obvious cost advantage):

A few years ago, I coined the following statement to encapsulate one of the many things I love about virtual work:

You work. They sleep. Reverse. Repeat.

When global teams work efficiently, they can move with a speed that is impossible for a single-office team to match, no matter how much Blue Bottle coffee is involved.   After cost, it is the single biggest advantage of global work.

Yet, for the past decade, most literature on global collaboration has focused on the negative aspects of 24-hour work cycles.  The party line has been that time zones are a handicap we must overcome, and global teams will always struggle to manage communication, iterate quickly, handle disconnects, and clarify scope.

This is with good reason.  Few global firms have reached a level of efficiency where they reap the advantages of 24-hour work cycles.  Inevitably, the baton is  fumbled, dropped, and stabbed into the hearts of unwitting customers.

Passing the baton is a discipline and an art form.  It is what separates talented teams from stellar performers.  It is a ninja-level skill, and after 10 years, many teams are beginning to show us what is possible when the baton is passed smoothly, day ‘n’ nite.

Because of how important the baton-passing process is, my statement actually needs to be revised:

You work. They sleep.  Everyone talks.  Reverse. Repeat.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be demonstrating how Monsoon handles baton-passing for design and development.  

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It’s supposed to be a funny little prank.  Try it.

Call this number: 401-285-0701, and you’ll hear a horrible Indian accent, requisite long Indian name, and a message about him being your outsourced friend.

It’s spreading around the Internet quickly, mainly because I think people see it as harmless fun.

The problem with satire is that there is tremendous risk.  If it’s funny, you’re home-free.  If it’s not, the results can be disastrous.  So, if you’re Stephen Colbert, go for it.  If you’re Don Imus, don’t.

Does a bad accent, an Apu-style long name, and a badly-written message about outsourcing qualify as funny?

Maybe in 1999.

Today, if you’re a radio host who plays it, you should probably start sending out your resume.  You could probably make a good telemarketer.

Over the last 5 years, IT wages have been rising in India.  And for good reason!  Indian programmers are now some of the most experienced IT professionals in the world.

However, if alarmist blog posts are to be believed, this signals the beginning of the end for the still-nascent IT industry in India.   When Indian salaries are higher than American salaries, the incentive to offshore is gone.

Although I disagree with this premise for several reasons (the subject of future blog posts, I guess), I thought it would be interesting to try to figure out when the (cue horror film music) ‘Death Of Outsourcing’ is gonna go down.

So I channeled my undergraduate economics degree (ceteris paribus!!!) to figure this out.

Figuring out salary rates is easy.  But, if people are acting rationally (which economic professors are beginning to realize is a rare occurrence), they will consider more than just cost. Value must be factored into our equation.

Now, value is a subjective thing, but thanks to online marketplaces like oDesk, we can use ratings to understand the general value that customers are getting from the US and India.  We’ll use numbers from oDesk as our example.

For a variety of reasons, this is an admittedly flawed example,  but it serves our thought experiment just fine.

[For those who don't know, oDesk is an online marketplace that connects people looking for IT work with those providing it, like an eBay for IT.]

According to oDesk, Indian workers are paid an average of $11/hour, whereas American workers are paid $17.50.  There is a similar differential in value.  Indians received an average rating of 4.12 (out of 5), while Americans received an average rating of 4.48.

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In a few weeks, four of our best developers will be leaving their offices in India and traveling to a client’s headquarters to do some development work.  It’s a simple thing that happens every day, everywhere.

It’s called consulting.

Which is why it hit me like a ton of bricks when I was reminded, by a well-intentioned friend, what this is called when an Indian company does it.

“Oh right, body shopping.”

It doesn’t matter whether your team has worked on high-profile projects and gained valuable, specialized experience in their niche.  If they come from a third-world country, you’re just shopping bodies.

A few decades ago, Y2K fears lead to the employment of hundreds of Indian programmers at Western companies.  It’s easy to understand how our terminology for global work evolved during this time.  Indian salaries were a low fraction of Western pay; and Indian companies lacked the wherewithal to challenge Western thought on their fledgling industry.

But why have these terms stuck?

These words were never fair definitions.  Yet even if you assume they were justified, our industry has evolved far beyond the days of searching for 2-digit date fields.  Indian companies handle critical business processes and lead R&D efforts for the Fortune 100 set.  So why do we allow the persistence of outdated terminology that cheapens our profession?

Are we waiting for Thomas Friedman to write another book?