offshoring case study
motor
Using natural-language understanding, Response 8 recognizes what the
customer is asking in an e-mail and can respond with templated
answers from its knowledge base.
In commenting on this, I should note that I consider "natural-language
understanding" to be much ado about nothing, just like everything else
in the "field" of artificial intelligence. Of all the research areas in
computer science, AI has the most tantalizing applications but the least
amount of genuine technology to apply to those applications. It's a
non-field, in my view, and in the view of a number of university CS
departments which have decided not to invest any resources in it.
Nevertheless, the importance here is that this is not the "low-level
coding" that many apologists for offshoring like the characterize
offshore software development as. Indeed, my point has always been that
there is no such thing as "low-level coding." Programming is
programming.
Now look at this one:
"For every $1 we spend [in the United States], we spend 25 cents
overseas. So by keeping the budget the same, we increase the number
of [coders] available," said Ken Jochims, director of marketing at
Kana.
There is no more appropriate context for the old saying, "Too many cooks
spoil the broth" than software development. So, the statement above not
only shows that the potential cost savings of offshoring is limited, but
also that you are more likely to have your project go over deadline if
you use offshoring.
A potential problem, of course, is that the higher-ups in these firms
like the BofA that order their underlings to offshore--or, as more and
more evidence shows, the demands from investors that the firms offshore
(see my next posting)--don't see that the perceived cost savings are
actually minor or even negative.
Norm
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/12/22/50NNpsoft_1.html
Infoworld
By Ephraim Schwartz December 22, 2003
In what looks more and more like the way of the future, Kana, a midsize
CRM vendor, has introduced three separate applications for its customer
care suite within six months by turning to a company in India to write
the code.
The latest application, Kana Response 8, is an automated e-mail response
package deployed in customer-service solutions at Bank of America, Jet
Blue, Priceline, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota.
Using natural-language understanding, Response 8 recognizes what the
customer is asking in an e-mail and can respond with templated answers
from its knowledge base.
At the same time, the e-mail is put into a live-agent queue. If the
automated response resolves the customer query, then Response 8 goes
back into that queue and pulls out the e-mail.
But the bigger news is that this and two other applications -- IQ 8, the
knowledge base; and Service 8, a multichannel contact-center management
application -- were developed at HCL Technologies in India at about
one-fourth the cost of what Kana would have paid for developers in the
United States.
"For every $1 we spend [in the United States], we spend 25 cents
overseas. So by keeping the budget the same, we increase the number of
[coders] available," said Ken Jochims, director of marketing at Kana.
The software is still designed at Kana, and Kana controls product
management efforts.
Being able to turn to HCL or any outsource developer is greatly
facilitated by the fact the Kana uses a standard J2EE platform.
"It wouldn't be possible without a standard platform. That goes to the
whole concept of componentization," Jochims said.