By Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Editor
Cognizant is doing good and doing well. The technology consultancy wants to stem the tide of slowly degrading technical education in the U.S. It has just made a $1 million grant over three years to bolster the technology and engineering portions of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education.
Specifically, Cognizant’s grant will help Boston’s Museum of Science create a library of video training tools for the Museum’s Engineering is Elementary program and allow the New York Hall of Science to build a “Maker Space” for hands-on learning.
Cognizant saw three broad issues in… Read the rest
To me, it’s always good business to do well by doing good. That’s the spirit in which Wipro established its rural BPO program in Manjakuddi, a village with a population of 2500. A large percentage of the 54 employees live in a house with a thatched roof. The village is six hours by car from Chennai.
The mover and shaker behind this project is Puneet Chandra, global head and vice president, Corporate Business Services, who was moved by the work of two institutions:
- The Azim Premji Foundation, whose goal is to educate the girl child in rural India
- Swami
From the start of time, when economic troubles occur, the hardest-hit find a scapegoat. Today, there are many scapegoats. But outsourcing is certainly on the list.
IMHO, American companies that outsource are contributing to that public perception. Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, just co-authored a report entitled “The Moral Measure of the Economy.” One of the findings was that many of the nation’s largest 100 companies refused to disclose the breakdown of their workforce between the United States and other countries. From that he concludes, “They don’t want the public to know how aggressively… Read the rest
Stop people on the street and the answer to that question is obvious. Of course!
Does this happen to you, my outsourcing colleagues? You go somewhere. Start talking to people. They ask what you do. You mention outsourcing. And then you have to don a bomb suit like the munitions squad wears to shield you from the ugly invective that follows. Specifically, they are furious that American companies are using outsourcing service providers who are then offshoring the work.
This is 2011. We’ve been offshoring for a decade. I am still amazed at the misunderstandings out there about the… Read the rest
If I hear one more person complain that outsourcing is the major reason for the seemingly intractable U.S. unemployment rate, I will scream. I live in Las Vegas, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. Here is a quote from a letter to the editor of the local paper dated July 13:
Headline: “Nation’s jobs have gone overseas to the detriment of the U.S.”
Letter: “All I hear is, “Where are the jobs? The answer is they are overseas. … I don’t see other countries sending their jobs to the USA. How come?”
The jingoistic… Read the rest
Congratulations to Francisco d’Souza, president and CEO of Cognizant! The South Asian MBA Association recently named him “CEO of the Year.”
Cognizant is enjoying double-digit growth, ranking among the top outsourcing companies in India, and was added to the Fortune 500 this month.
D’Souza took the helm at Cognizant in 2007 as one of the youngest CEOs in South Asia. He’s no stranger to awards and accolades. Business Week ranks him as one of the world’s most successful immigrants; he also received the Economic Times Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2005.
Don’t you just hate having to say “I should have paid more attention to that”? Here are four news items that caught my eye, as they bode strongly of trends that will change the outsourcing pulse.
Pay attention to these trends now and start planning for them in your future outsourcing strategies — or you’ll wnat to kick yourself later for not having done it sooner.
Trend #1. U.S. and UK banks are currently reducing the number of service providers they use, narrowing them down to two or three providers with whom they have a high level of… Read the rest
As companies increasingly turn to software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for their monthly subscription-based pricing model and business agility benefits, HR recruitment tools are a focus of SaaS software development companies and venture capitalists funding them.
Two SaaS recruiting tools to be aware of: Evolv and PeopleMatter.
Evolv is science-based talent intelligence software that goes beyond job-matching according to skills. It matches applicants to job types based on behaviors, motivation, and workstyle. The company claims its SaaS tool reduces attrition by 20-30 percent and improves operating margins by 20 percent. Its $15.75 million in VC funding will be used to expand to global markets.
PeopleMatter was launched in September after acquiring the software assets of Columbia-based Acadia… Read the rest
Research firm Forrester reports TCS received the overall highest customer reference scores among the 19 service providers it evaluated for its recent report, ”The Forrester Wave™: Global IT Infrastructure Outsourcing, Q1 2011.”
Assessed on 36 criteria in three categories (current offering, strategy, and market presence), TCS was ranked as a Leader for global IT infrastructure outsourcing.
A discouraging word in the outsourcing world is insourcing (or backsourcing). Although insourcing is a reality, it’s important not to view this kind of activity from a sky-is-falling perspective. While the “insourcing trend” described in the Goodbye Outsourcing article published today in cio.com rightfully took a journalistic view and didn’t necessarily intend to raise an alarm, attention to the article has spread like wildfire in just a few hours. (Even a hint of bad news always spreads quickly.) From my view, the article missed some important perspectives on insourcing.
First of all, some outsourcing deals are planned from the
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