An argument against outsourcing your IT work. A quote from the article:
He told me that before Wal-Mart’s people actually write and deploy an app, they make the developer work in the job the app is being written to support. If Wal-Mart devises a new point-of-sale system, for example, software team members have to spend time working the cash registers first. Design empathy for software development is, of course, a wonderful thing. There’s also no argument to be made against the world’s largest retailer’s enviable returns on its enormous IT investments. The numbers speak for themselves.
That said, making your programmers work the registers or inventory the stockrooms represents a level of involvement that’s not taught in most software curricula. I had never heard of or observed a major company making that kind of ongoing commitment.
Listening to the user, yes; being the user, no.
But the Wal-Mart story provokes an obvious but underappreciated aspect of software development methodology. Empathy may or may not lead to high-quality code, but it surely improves the chances that the app will be adopted and implemented by its intended users. CIOs can’t afford to ignore the critical link between software development and application deployment. Yet they often do. They believe that they can actually save money by outsourcing the development of code and divorcing development and deployment. That’s simply not true.
I can’t help but wonder that the shops that outsource (either near-shore or off-shore) their IT see IT as a cost burden to be minimized. IT is not seen in these shops as having strategic value.
Only time will tell if the great IT diaspora will bring true cost savings to the companies pursuing this trend. However, I do know of one company where the “non-IT” workers are now setting up shadow IT departments because they can’t get comprehensive, responsive and correct solutions from their offshore partners.
These companies are saving paper money on the IT budget and loosing real money from shadow IT budgets.