What do CGI-AMS Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp know about Virginia's heartland that would prompt them to hire hundreds of software engineers and build multimillion-dollar technology centers there? Ellen McCarthy provides a number of answers in Mining Coal Country for Tech Workers - Economics, Politics Send Contractors Into Southwest Virginia, (Washington Post, January 2, 2006)

• rents are cheap
• traffic is light
• talent is available

Are you thinking "duh" to the first two, but "huh?" to the last? Don't be so surprised!

"The area turns out plenty of résumés that the companies want to see. Local officials drafted a study to show that 4,566 computer science degrees were awarded in the past five years by colleges within 100 miles of Lebanon [Virginia], including Virginia Tech, Radford University and James Madison University."

But the overriding driver for businesses?

• 'Most companies expect to save 30 to 40 percent on projects done through a process dubbed "onshore outsourcing," or "farmshoring." The average salary for the 300 people CGI-AMS expects to hire in Lebanon, for instance, will be $50,000 -- far above the town's $27,606 average annual wage but about half the salary an advanced software developer in Northern Virginia might earn.'

And while the salaries may be a bit higher than oversees outsourcing options, there are advantages beyond the fact that some government contracts insist on U.S. workers for security purposes. As I've blogged about in the past, a number of studies have found the cost of outsourcing is frequently underestimated. Issues related to time zone separation and cultural differences must be factored in when outsourcing to places like India. Southwest Virginia has a distinct advantage here. Even the spread of corporate culture is easier to handle when workers can rotate in to headquarters for occasional training and team building exercises. Adding this to the list of reasons:

• U.S. citizenship and/or work location may be required for some government contracts
• Cost to overcome time zone and cultural differences is lessened
• Cost for the occasional face-to-face meeting is lower

Then there's the political angle: government wheelers and dealers are helping make these deals even more attractive. In Virginia, Governor Mark Warner would love to boost his approval ratings as he plots a path to run for President,. Similarly in Kentucky, SAIC has expanded in the hometown of Rep. Harold "Hal" Rogers (R), who controls some of the purse strings for homeland security spending. The Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce, sponsors a number of programs with this goal in mind. So add to the list:

• economic incentives

And have you wondered yet, "why Lebanon, VA?" Perhaps it's the '$1.65 million in federal grants that, along with funds from the state's tobacco commission, was used to install fiber-optic cable necessary for tech companies to operate.'

• technical infrastructure

This is where my favorite topics come into play, because without the bandwidth to communicate electronically and transfer large files and databases, distributed work simply won't work. Lebanon branch offices could become a development island, leaving the workforce to react to a constantly shifting govenment contracting environment. An integrated workforce can more easily be tasked to fill in holes across the entire company, enabling long-term economic advantage for the area.

The parting thought: 'Speculation about when a Starbucks will appear is rampant on the streets of Lebanon'.  I'd say as soon as the execs move in!

5:31:37 PM    

IBM's corporate blog strategy is the topic of this excellent article, well worth the read for any company that's remotely open to innovative uses of technology.

IBM started a major initiative last May with three approaches, accomplishing three goals: corporate sponsored blogs on their products (thought leadership), internal employee blogs (internal communication), and a policy with encourages employees to blog publicly on any topic as long as they follow some common-sense guidelines (learning & growth). The reason why is summed up here:

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technical strategy and innovation and the company's highest-ranking blogger, said Big Blue is encouraging employees to bone up on blogging for the same reason it asked them to get savvy about Web commerce in the 1990s.

"We absolutely recognize that blogging, just like the Internet, World Wide Web, Linux and open source, is a major initiative in the marketplace that we should be part of. This best way to be part of it is not to observe it passively but to do it actively," Wladawsky-Berger said.

IBM, like many companies, set up an internal blog capability to get comfortable with the new technology. The postings are evolving over time, from individual postings on personal topics to a company-wide collaboration tool.

Big Blue bit by the blogging bug By JULIE MORAN ALTERIO (THE JOURNAL NEWS, January 9, 2006)

8:36:10 AM    

Behold the Virtual Company by Sam Varghese (Syndey Morning Herald, December 9, 2005) provides a peek at what the future of work may hold for more and more of us in the IT industry.

The Austrailian IT Register was founded in 2005 by Owen Baker, who sees a real advantages in the distributed development business model. 

The virtual team approach relies on independent subcontractors who for the most part work from home. The company provides a web-based extranet for its staff and clients.

Overhead is low with no corporate office space, and also because there's no cost when staff members are "on the bench" between gigs. They tend to work for smaller clients and see profit margins of around 20 - 30 percent - too small to attract much attention from traditional IT vendors. Despite unpaid bench time, consultants typically make 20 to 50% more than they would as salaried employees.

Baker says "...a virtual company such as ours is seen by many as the way of the future for many organisations - a mobile flexible workforce that can change and adapt as needs come and go. I personally think this is the kind of model that will shape the future of 'work and career' as we know it over the next 20 to 30 years..."

What about the difficulty managing from a distance? Baker's approach, simply put, treats people like grownups: ask for reasonable estimates on each job, and expect people to live up to them. There is a potential advantage in that most independent consultants are self-starters to begin with.

4:22:54 PM    

In a previous posting I commented on enablers for radical innovation. Dave Pollard picked up on the same BusinessWeek article and explored the concept of an Innovation Incubator a bit further. According to Dave, most innovation gurus agree that a separate organizational structure is required for an existing company to be successful with radical innovation. Armed with quotes from Clay Christensen, the reasons are twofold: incubators have different organizational needs, and separation minimizes the distraction on the existing business.

The United States Postal Service took a twist on the separate-business-unit approach that also falls in line with many gurus' suggestions. They outsourced an innovation incubator initiative "The purpose of the Mailing Industry Task Force (MITF) Innovation Incubator Initiative (I3) is to:

• Reach out beyond the mailing industry to other successful and innovative companies to identify potential synergies leading to new initiatives that will grow revenue, improve the use and effectiveness of mail, and help shape the future of mail, such that the entire mailing industry and its customers benefit.
• Execute a process by which new innovations can be identified, incubated, and implemented. "

6:31:37 PM    

A New Blueprint For The Enterprise by Christopher Koch (CIO Magazine, March 1, 2005) offers a case study on implementing Enterprise Architecture at Dow Jones. According to Koch, today's EA groups have certain characteristics in common:

"Most have a small central group (Forrester found that 84 percent of companies it surveyed had centralized enterprise architecture groups of fewer than 10 people, regardless of company size). The groups dangle a carrot (money) and wield a big stick (project review). Their goals are to promote alignment, standardization, reuse of existing IT assets, and the sharing of common methods for project management and software development across the company. The end result, theoretically, is that enterprise architecture will make IT cheaper, more strategic and more responsive. "

Note the term "theoretically" in the quote above. In the past, the ROI on EA hasn't been too clear. Koch believes that two advances in integration technologies are changing that fact: services and events.

With service-oriented architectures, "Businesspeople can call for a service in a language they can understand, and IT can quickly link these with other services to form a workflow or, if need be, build a new application. These applications can be built quickly because complex, carefully designed interfaces allow developers to connect to the services without having to link directly to the code inside them. They don't even have to know how the service was built or in which type of language it was written."

Events use IT systems to monitor business activities, then kicking off new activities to handle the event. For example, when inventories of a particular item fall below a certain threshhold, the order department can be notified to restock.

So here's the first intersection: communication and collaboration technologies such as IM and presence can facilitate the handling of events such as this, and should be part of the EA requirements. 

On to the second intersection: collaboration isn't only managed as a requirement under the EA umbrella, but can also used as an enabler for the EA development process itself. EA groups, as gatekeepers of sorts, should expect resistance from the rest of the business. One way to reduce resistance is to build buy-in by consulting with businesspeople along the way, and collaboration tools can spread the influence of a 10-person EA team, inviting participation from a much larger audience than they could otherwise reach.

"Another is to devote a portion of architects' time to consulting with businesspeople about the IT projects they'd like to see. Whether through formal governance mechanisms or informal meetings with businesspeople, the enterprise architects are the CIO's strategy research group. The CIO gathers the feedback from the architects and uses it to build links between IT and the business.

And finally, the third intersection: the value of EA comes through reuse. Collaboration and communication are part of the knowledge management toolbox that enables enterprise reuse. For a terrific example of this concept, take a look at the Federal Enterprise Architecture's CORE.gov website for Component Organization and Registration Environment:

"Using the CollabNet SourceCast tool, CORE.GOV is a robust collaborative environment that organizes and maps the components in a variety of ways to make them easy to identify, discuss and develop."

5:14:50 PM    

Three points:
(1) I'm back, after a much too long break from blogging, (2) the blog is different, and my views have expanded quite a bit - from telework to distributed work and beyond, and (3) I hope to hear from you - email me at dolan@software.org.

P.S. If you've subscribed to the "Telework Times" news feed in the past and want to stick to just telework-related posts, you might prefer to switch to my news feed from the "telework" category.

5:18:29 AM    

Taking the stress out of work More feds are doing their jobs from home or satellite locations By Colleen O'Hara (Federal Computer Week, Oct. 4, 2004).

Federal agencies are viewing telework in a whole new light these days. "Telework — working from home or a location other than the office — was originally viewed as a way to reduce traffic. But more frequently, feds see it as a way to keep the government running in the event of a disaster. "

Experiences have shown that "In most cases, managers and employees have a learning curve. But in the end, communication, trust and productivity make teleworking successful."

The article includes a mini-case study on a Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration teleworker. Tom Salter. a web application developer, works from home full time and permanently. "He set up a home office, does most of his work off-line and communicates with team members via e-mail." Salter and his manager, Bob Donnan, plan his work in 2-week increments, so that it's easy to measure progress and results. Donnan established weekly teleconferences to keep the six-person group, all teleworking, connected to the team as a whole. TIGTA's formal telework policy provides up to half of the cost of broadband Internet connection, and requires employees to sign an MOU stating expectations such as expenses and performance. Salter began teleworking as a way of increasing his productivity by avoiding office interruptions.

As another mini-case study, Mertis Baffoe-Harding, a budget analyst at the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) and her manager, Gregory Gould, agree that teleworking has reduced stress and created a happier and more productive employee. Baffoe-Harding began teleworking to provide more flexibility while caring for an aging parent.

Catherine Baranek, who advises the Department of Veterans Affairs on human resources issues, started with the DC-based agency as a virtual employee, working from a remote VA office near her home in Winston-Salem, NC. Gaining her specialized expertise is a boon to the VA office that hired her.

Both Donnan and Baranek point to lack of social interaction as an issue. Baranek "misses out on the social bonding with her colleagues, face-to-face meetings and the chance to participate on committees." and says "I think I lose out on all those intangibles — being part of the organization and having that daily recognition that contributes to your career," she said. "Before people knew me, it was hard to make appointments and get people to do things for me." Donnan's emphasis on weekly teleconferences is one way of minimizing the problem; Baranek and her manager, Larry Ables, speak at least once each day. Trust and communication are the keys to successful teleworking.

Processes will be impacted by the addition of teleworkers.  Barabek's experiences showed that her VA office wasn't fully electronic after all. New systems and processes were put in place to share data more easily. "Teleworking usually means adjusting how you work." Baranek says. "consider whether you could work with less social interaction."

The Telework Consortium investigates and pilots tools and technologies that help with that last point... do you really have to settle for less social interaction when teleworking? Perhaps not as much as you think!

2:03:13 PM