Outsourcing Development

A year or so ago, Callum Potter blogged about an article regarding the outsourcing of business processes, and the role that Business Motivation Modeling (BMM) techniques and Business Process Modeling using BPMN can play in facilitating this. I’ve continued to investigate the needs of the outsourcing community, and have recently published a new whitepaper entitled ‘Outsourcing Development‘ in which I aim to map the challenges of outsourcing to the application of process support, analysis & design, and asset management tools.

The five key challenges I examined were:

• Keeping business processes and the solutions that support them closely aligned
• Maintaining investment in intellectual property within, or accessible to, the organization
• Understanding the hand-over points between client and supplier organizations
• Preserving interoperability of long-lived IT system assets
• Minimizing client risk through adherence to standards for development practices

Of course, these challenges are in addition to the risks that are associated with the management of outsourced activities themselves.

In times where standards-based process improvement is de rigueur, seen in the continued push towards CMMI levels 4 & 5, it seems strange to me that so often these activities don’t include the use of standards-based analysis & design methods. Even stranger is that the software assets which are being developed offshore are so rarely subject to formal asset management techniques which can help to not only control the assets, but also to widen their use within a component- or service-based approach.