Offshoring Revives Man-Month Myth ...

Computerworld - ... as IT shops apply "brute-force programming techniques" with low-cost coders from India and elsewhere. That's the observation of Tom Bigelow, CEO of Performance Software Corp., a Phoenix-based developer of custom software for the aerospace industry. Bigelow says companies that hire offshore developers in bulk eventually hit a wall. That's because, as Frederick P. Brooks Jr. revealed in The Mythical Man-Month, his classic book on software engineering published nearly 30 years ago, you can't compress the time it takes to complete software simply by throwing more bodies at it -- not even in the Internet age. Most IT managers have been "mandated to cut x percent from their budget," Bigelow contends. So, many have grasped at the straw of offshore development with the hope of saving money and still getting big development jobs done. The frequent results, he says, are late projects, bad projects and dead projects. While upper management is busy updating its spreadsheets with lower-cost programmers from abroad, many midlevel IT managers are foundering as they try to control workgroups overseas, Bigelow says. But he acknowledges that offshore workers are "ideal for certain tasks, such as test and verification." The best IT departments are "tri-partnering" their development, Bigelow says, describing an ideal scenario in which 60% of the work is done in-house, 30% is sent offshore and 10% is outsourced to U.S. firms.
Extended enterprise supply chains call ...
... for new tools to augment ERP software, according to Peter West, vice president of marketing at RiverOne Inc. in Irvine, Calif. "ERP systems are designed to work in-house, not across multiple suppliers," West claims. Yet, he notes, companies that have business partners manufacture goods for them want to control the process "as if [the goods] were being made inside their four walls." RiverOne's Interactive application, which targets electronics manufacturers, gives supply chain managers exactly that - an inside look at the work being done by their partners. With the Interactive 6.0 upgrade scheduled for release in next year's first quarter, customers will get a new "adaptive supply chain architecture" that lets them use wizard-style tools to create business processes throughout their supply chains, West says. Users will be able to define the roles of various partners in the manufacturing process and then use exception-based reporting methods to assure quality and accountability. "At the end of the day, the best supply chain wins," West says.

Peter West, vice president of marketing at RiverOne Inc.