Whenever a company chooses to outsource, there is a certain relinquishment of control. It is simply neither possible nor desirable to hold tightly to the reins of all aspects of an outsourced project. It stands to reason, therefore, that studies in the industry have revealed that many in IT management either are dissatisfied with their outsourcers or feel their outsourcers have “made up” work to pad their billings.
Things become even more problematic when the outsourced project has an off-shored element. Often, cultural differences and distance contribute to increasing both the risks and management costs. Eventually, the risks wipe out the potential increase in benefits.
All of this comes back to the issue of control, or, to paraphrase one of my favorite figures of the 20th Century, Muhammad Ali, “You can’t fix what you can’t see.”
In a move that will improve management of outsourced projects and shed greater visibility on them, CAST today announced a partnership with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading IT services, consulting and business solutions firm.
The strategic partnership will provide Tata with the CAST Application Intelligence Platform®, which will allow TCS consultants to automatically analyze and measure the essential structural quality attributes (reliability, security, performance and maintainability) of client applications, whether developed by TCS or by other vendors. The service will reduce the risk of high impact business disruptions due to corrupted data, application outages, security breaches and performance problems.
