Offshoring or inshoring, Incremental methodology and GeneXus

Yesterday professor Ph.D Carlos S. Baradello and 17 MBA students of the University of San Francisco visited Artech’s laboratory at Zonamérica Business & Technology Park. They are on a tour through Latin America, visiting different companies trying to understand if nearshoring (in Latin America) is a valid alternative to offshoring. They are about to write their thesis about that topic.

Gisela Bertelli (Business Development Manager) briefly introduced them Artech, I demoed GeneXus and Dane Drotts (President of GeneXus USA) told them how the Incremental methodology and GeneXus let him sell and accomplish outsourcing / nearshoring projects with success.

How does it work? Ok, when you outsource there are two ways to work.

Let’s start with the traditional approach: The Customer creates the WHOLE spec of what he wants, sends it to India or wherever and 1 or 2 years later he get exactly, on time, etc , what he want … ed 1 or 2 years ago! Ok, what he thought he wanted … because one thing is what he imagined and another what he wrote down and signed, and another what the other side interpreted. OK OK, supposing a perfect world he got what he wanted 1 year ago. But technology may have changed … 1 year ago VB 6 was the hype, now it is .NET, or it was GUI, and now it is WEB. OK OK OK, suppose technology didn’t have changed. But what about the business? Didn’t it change? What about your dreams in the last year or two?. The problem is that nobody will tell you, CEO, that something is wrong in what you get … the CIO or whoever the stakeholder was, at least won’t! He was the one that told his friends how cool it is to outsource there and what a big budget he manages, the one who told you to sign that big contract. How much did it cost? Some millions of bucks: “Very cheap!” you thought when they told you how many, many hours it would take to so many, many engineers to accomplish it and how few, very few bucks each hour costs offshore .

The incremental approach GeneXus USA is implementing works so: there are some (3 or 4) Analysts working out requirements at your (the Client’s) offices and sending them to a Software Factory in Uruguay. In the Factory other 5 or 6 develop with GeneXus and after just some days or weeks you get prototypes, you SEE and LIVE feedback, ask for changes and changes are ready in the next day and you see, hear, visualize how it’s growing and how prototypes are transformed and in 2 or 3 months are used in production environments and your internal operations get optimized. You may see it first in .net and then tell the Analysts that it should be in Java because you are about to move all to linux or because you had a dream and want it so and they say “OK no problem!” ask you what other dreams you have and if such dreams happen often J, write to Uruguay and what do they do? Generate again in java and next morning you already see the same you saw yesterday in .net running now in java and you can’t believe your eyes how it’s going forward and all your changes in the requirements are done so fast and you begin to think that these engineers are magicians or something like that .. and you know what? Yes, there are excellent, but they can do it fast because they work in small, dynamic teams and they have a GREAT TOOL: GeneXus! Which is THE TOOL that allows this INCREMENTAL approach, allows them to change anything so fast and generates in the platform you want, generates knowledge based and pattern based and automatizes them all and allows these engineers to focus on your requirements, on your business. They work on a knowledge level, a conceptual level and don’t get distracted learning XML, jscript, html, VB, java, ADO, etc etc etc.

So, MBA students, we would of course be very happy if the results of your studies are that nearshoring is the best, and even more, that you see Uruguay in latam as the best option J. But whatever your conclusion is, if it is offshoring or nearshoring inshoring, if outsourcing or insourcing: suggest to safe bucks and time: suggest to do it incrementally … and with GeneXus. It may not be the option the whole world uses … but (a business card I got told me :-) that) your Minds and Hearts are being educated at USF to Change the World. So do it and release your talent!

As Albert Einstein said:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Thank you for visting Uruguay, hope you enjoy Punta del Este tomorrow.