Articles covering outsourcing topics by analysts such as Gartner and consulting firms like Accenture often stay at such high level that their practical application requires engaging these firms. Once in a while these articles could be very informative and helpful The latest KPMG study is worth taking look at. That study covering outsourcing for technology-related services shows some radical changes and interesting trends in the marketplace, to which both companies and service providers will need to adapt. 2015 study by KPMG covers over 2,100 contracts across 23 countries with an annual contract value of US$12 billion+. It provides insights into service provider performance as well as extensive insight […]

A couple days ago my first full size book went into beta and is now available at the publisher website – http://pragprog.com/book/nkout/outsource-it. I feel very happy and relieved that the book is finally out, writing it was far more challenging than I’ve ever anticipated. At the same time I feel happy and proud, proud to be one of the authors of the pragmatic bookshelf, the group of technology writers that earned respect across very broad and demanding technical audience. It will take a little while before the book hits the shelves of Amazon and other bookstores, but you don’t have to wait and get your […]

Outsourcing is a very broad topic with plenty of controversial topics, inevitably there plenty of people who have something to say about it. Chances are if you are interested in this subject you run across articles and posts by Outsourcing Institute or Horses for Sources. A couple years ago I put a few references in my blogroll and started a blogosphere directory. Thanks to the law of reciprocity that generated a few back-links and traffic to my blog. Over time the blogroll become stale pointing the blogs that become dormant or completely disappeared. I did not notice it till just recently, as I was doing […]

A couple weeks ago I put an RFP out for a very specific set of SEO activities on one of bidding sites. This SEO project was for my darling app – WWHOW!.  Since WWHOW! is based on user generated content it offers serious SEO challenges. Having spent a few months fighting those I knew fairly well what I was looking for and did not make a secret out of my expectations. To no surprise my straightforward SEO request generated a lot of responses primarily from India-based providers. I just finished going through all responses I received to date and it looks like I will have […]

A few weeks ago we went through upgrade of anti-spam software we use in-house. The Bayesian filter database got corrupted during the upgrade or possibly before it and for some reasons we could not restore it from backups. After much ado we decided to start anew. Software upgrade was quite impressive and new filters reduced the volume of spam dramatically, the majority of the users did not even noticed the little problem we had. It was not the case for me, all knowledge previous version of the software gained about my spam designation was lost and many of my service providers came back. Today I […]