For Friday, here’s “Seven Distinct Paths of Decision and Action” by Warren Kinston and Jimmy Algie from 1989. This paper describes the seven different approaches to decision-making, but note that it’s really about action.

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Tata Consultancy just won the Chrysler IT contract, worth billions. It’s probably a good time to look again at McKinsey Quarterly’s interview with Ratan Tata from 2005. The Indian mega-corporations have some different ways of thinking than their US competitors, holding values that oddly sound more democratic. Well, India is the world’s largest democracy with [...]

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One the biggest problems facing outsourcing projects stems from the cost savings themselves. Most companies determine the size and level of a project or work by its cost. They don’t assign work based upon its strategic value or (following Dr. Jaques and Lord Brown) on a measure of complexity. They simply assign it based on cost. Let’s look at what this does for outsourcing work.

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There are two recent articles by Thomas Friedman, who did the recent PBS series on outsourcing to India. He’s also written a book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, which is due out soon.
Friedman’s article in the New York Times Magazine (It’s a Flat World After All”) is interesting. [...]

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J sent me this article on the improving relations between China and India. When I went to the colloquiom on leading multi-cultural change (new associate coming out of that; stay tuned for an announcement here), I heard an earful on this from the Indians present. India needs stable relations with China simply because of proximity. [...]

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Corante’s Outsourcing blog has reprinted T.A. Heppenheimer’s fascinating “How America Chose Not to Beat Sputnik Into Space” from the Winter 2004 issue of Invention and Techology. Also see the copyright information for the article. I’m not sure what this really has to do with outsourcing, but you can see how US leaders manipulated perceptions of [...]

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The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, a publications of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems, has devoted an entire issue to IT Outsourcing. Jens Dibbern, Time Goles, Rudy Hirschheim and Bandula Jayatilaka take over the entire issue for a journal-length review of everything that has been done.
One of the interesting [...]

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