Application Services

Continue reading "Agile Vision" »

Posted by Raghu Angara at 5:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Agile has gained significant momentum over the last five years with organizations scrambling to embrace Agile methods. It has become popular amongst various industry executives too. But do organizations really need Agile? Are they ready to adopt Agile? How will they benefit from Agile?  These are million dollar questions with no monetized answers, but it sounds great for the executives to brand their organizations "Agile". "We are an Agile shop!"

Continue reading "Agile - How do we do it?" »

Posted by Raghu Angara at 4:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In my previous blog, we identified the drivers causing a continuous tug of war, for an enterprise, between standardizing the business operations and IT assets AND meet the consumer's demand for an increasingly personalized product experience. However, with the realities today being limited resources, fast evolving technology and convergence of a multi-vendor marketplace, organizations, in order to survive and accelerate, need to redraw the boundaries to answer questions like

Continue reading "Standardization vs. Personalization - Where do you draw the line of equilibrium?" »

Posted by Mansi Khare at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Suman Sasmal - Vice President and Service Delivery Head, CORPBITS, Infosys

Bollywood superstar, Amitabh Bachchan has managed to stay relevant over the years by constantly re-inventing himself. Is there a lesson here that one of India's greatest exports can give to another?
IT outsourcing business has become rapidly commoditized yet the dynamics have changed so much that cost and efficiency alone are no longer the sole motivators for outsourcing.

The industry is slowly but surely reinventing itself to go from being an efficient supplier of services to a strategic partner enabling business outcomes. The innovative ways vendors take to re-define themselves in a rapidly changing economic environment can put them right on track to achieve Outsourcing Superstardom.

To know more, click here

Continue reading "A Lesson from Bollywood for Outsourcing" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember the time when a mobile was just an instrument used to make a phone call on the move and came in limited price bundles? That was the level of customization offered by wireless service providers and OEMs. Today, the end customer demands a complete smart phone experience with abilities like plugging in his cable provider to schedule DVR recordings, reading his email, view real-time traffic, and weather news etc. All this, while continuing to provide him with the ability to talk and send messages. So, an AT&T partners with a Samsung which in turn partners with Google to provide the necessary platform and connectivity to the smart phone. Other providers like Comcast, CNN and others leverage this platform to provide geo-synced news and weather. Very soon, service features like home security controls and smart home controls will become popular on the smart phone too. This will add at least a dozen more vendors and multiple services to this already complex ecosystem. Such a multi-vendor eco system requires a level of standardization to the platforms and interfaces across these vendors. At the same time there is a need to accommodate the customer's demands and preferences of service...

Continue reading "Standardization - Can it support today's "personalization" needs?" »

Posted by Mansi Khare at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Feature Engineering [FE] and Sustain Engineering [SE] form the two most important work streams in any large engineering service delivery program.

Feature Engineering [FE] involves design, development, testing and deployment of "new features" in a product. This work stream requires requirements engineering and therefore demands a closer interaction with the business groups and product users.  

On the other hand Sustain Engineering [SE] deals with the task of keeping the "house in order". Ensuring that the existing production systems behave as intended and resolving critical production issues forms the crux of SE. Sustain Engineering requires a thorough understanding of the system and close interaction with the Production Support teams and also Product Users.

So which is important?  - Feature Engineering [FE] or Sustain Engineering [SE]. Without a doubt we all know that the answer is BOTH - but it's not that simple.

Continue reading "Feature Engineering vs Sustain Engineering - The debate continues" »

Posted by Kartik Matmari at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Deepti Seshadri, Project Manager, Infosys

Did your UX designer ever tell you that he or she needs time to speak to actual users and create 'Personas' before continuing? Did this request surprise you? Why would the designer need personas when the requirements have been stated clearly? There is nothing wrong if such questions crossed your mind. A common thought is that personas are not required. After all, how can a set of hypothetical user profiles really influence the overall user design of an application...

Continue reading "Personas for better UX! Is it really necessary?" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Suman Sasmal, Vice President and Service Delivery Head - Application Development and Maintenance, Infosys

 

A cat has 9 lives, so goes the saying. I am not sure what a cat thinks of this, but the world of business would love to be like a cat!
 
And why not? Only 12% of the Fortune 500 companies has remained on the list every year since the list was introduced in 1955. And over 2,000 of them have appeared, disappeared and appeared again throughout their journey. Similarly, the average churn rate of FTSE 100 ever since the Index was created in 1984 is 14 per cent. Companies come and go off the list, to come back on it again. So, even if fierce competition or changing technologies drive companies off the list, many of them gather strength, adapt to situations and survive. Who said only cats have 9 lives?...

Continue reading "A cat has 9 lives... how many does outsourcing have?" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 5:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Kartik Matmari, Senior Project Manager, Infosys

I manage a services delivery program for a large software manufacturer in the world where we have 85 Engineers and managers, 3 different development centers spread across India and the United States. We use a perfect AGILE engineering model to deliver critical business functionality for the platform that is responsible for 95% of the client's revenue.

CIOs and IT Decision makers at global corporations continue to express their skepticism on the efficacy of an Agile engineering model involving multiple geographies, multiple time zones, different set of people from different cultures, multiple development centers etc.

I have been often approached by my colleagues from different accounts in Infosys to discuss the details of my program, how it's different from theirs and how we can adopt best-practices if any. I also got the opportunity to discuss the success of global agile delivery with the directors of a large US Retail giant who were skeptic about outsourcing work to Indian locations because they believed that Agile engineering model would not work in an Onsite-Offshore setup. My discussion with them was very positive and most of their myths were cleared and also influenced their IT decision in favor of a global delivery.

The most common arguments by CIOs/Directors/IT Decision makers against a global agile delivery model are:

"All members should be at the same location for Scrum to be successful"
"Different locations means lack of involvement of team members"
"X-Geo Scrum is not truly agile"
"Onsite Teams more productive than offshore teams"

I am sharing some of the most common points of discussion about global agile through some images and diagrammatical representation

Continue reading "2 Geographies, 3 Development Centers, 85 Engineers and One Common Goal" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 4:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Kartik Matmari, Senior Project Manager, Infosys

I was part of a large team at Infosys working for an application development program for a global customer. One of the good things of the program was a customer visit to the Infosys offshore locations every six months, after a large program release.  This regular customer visit was an integral part of the relationship as these "release celebrations" created a great sense of inclusivity and instilled a sense of importance and responsibility for everyone involved both at offshore and onsite locations. During these "release celebrations", star performers would be rewarded and recognized, key contributions appreciated and future projects and roadmaps discussed. ...

Continue reading "Sometimes a self-inflicted pain is necessary to ensure success" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 5:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)