Can Software as a Service (SaaS) projects be done offshore?

By Emmy Gengler

Sometime I get these incredulous looks from people when I tell them that we are able to do SaaS (Software as a Service) projects offshore, and not only the software development portion, but we involve offshore resources from the very beginning of any transition to SaaS project.

There is value to be had in involving offshore resources from the very beginning:

1. Begins the knowledge transfer process immediately giving the offshore team a much better understanding of what needs to be developed.
   
   
2. Optimum use of onshore and offshore resources provides for a better use of monetary funds by the client.

What can offshore resources actually be involved with? Below is a list, in chronological order of the types of activities we involve offshore resources in before development of the application even starts:

• Write the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) based on the lists of required functionality
• Develop use cases
• Technical architecture design
• Detailed design
• Design Look & Feel of the new site - show sample screen shots
• Prototype

Read the rest of the article at Sourcing Blogosphere.

Outsourcing Blogging - it will become a trend!

Since early last month, the whole journalism industry especially in the United States started buzzing about the 'invasion' of outsourcing, citing a case that was purported to be among the first of the many potential threatening trends for many full-time local journalists. I ended my take on the issue with a scenario where no on-site journalists would be employed anyway, in the case of over 70-million blogs out there today representing a powerful force of mostly (99+%!) independent or micro publications. With so many bloggers publishing between one to two blogs each, one could guess the number of microworkers in indy journalism industry to be about 1 every 20 Internet users today, or ~5% (and increasing fast) of worldwide Internet users!

Technorati, a leading community of bloggers and a web engine that scours its millions of members' blogs in its April statistics further revealed the shocking numbers like, 120,000 new weblogs are created every day (that's1.4 new blog every second or well over 40 millions new blogs a year to boost the growth in number of blog sites at well over 50% in 2007 alone) and 1.5 millon blog posts are published every day (~17 posts per second).

Seeing these shocking numbers, some journalists of the mainstream media would respond: "Aargh, more junks for the tangled Web!". True indeed as the bulk of these blog posts and websites would fall under the category of splogs (spam posts), 'engrished' (in butchered English language) and duplicates (plagiarized/pirated content from other sites, particular of the mainstream news agencies like Reuters, AP, ANN and Bernama or mega broadacasters/publishers like CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, WSJ, CCTV, Al-Jazeera, MTV, Media Prima, Utusan, Karangkraf etc.)

It's commonly known however that for decades, the mainstream media including the big names like Reuters have been outsourcing news reporting to independent journalists and to various partners throughout the world. 'New media' companies like CNET and About.com for instance have also been outsourcing content creation to hundreds of independent journalists since their inception year. Slashdot and Dmoz Open Directory (and sister sites like MusicMoz, Chefmoz etc) further took the outsourcing concept further to pool content from the entire Internet crowd, i.e.'crowdsourcing'. As well, Wikipedia took advantage the similar collaborative model and soon later, successfully trounced the former kings of encyclopedias like Britannica and Microsoft/MSN Encarta. [Gone to the higher extremes today, many media hosts let the individuals themselves publish their own content directly for free as observed at today's leading websites like Myspace/Friendster/Orkut/MSN Spaces/Yahoo 360, Wordpress/Google Blogger, YouTube/Imeem, eBay, Del.icio.us/Blinklist, Digg/Topix/Newsvine, LinkedIn/Xing/Ryze/Ecademy etc. but original non-commercial journalism content concern us more in this post]

Most Internet users would insist that Wikipedia, Slashdot, CNET Blogs, Topix/Newsvine and YouTube are no junks! These sites with loads of original contents by hundreds or thousands dedicated contributors (or a lot more in the case of YouTube) have become some of the most relied reference networks/resources for many including for academic work and business. In fact, there have also been many cases in US court sessions where Wikipedia has been cited for definition references. Even journalists for the mainstream media often flock to sites like Slashdot and YouTube for their hot stories.

And the millions of bloggers, will soon realize, if not already, the power of outsourcing for turning their modest online creations into something more meaningful or influential like CNET, HowStuffWork and Wikipedia (a long shot, but possible for smaller niche of subjects) or in the case of local scenes, MalaysiaKini (maintaining its solid mark in local journalism), The Cicak/CJC Media Network/Project 010 (flourishing -- fresh in the market), NSTP's Monsters Blog (fading? -- after all, these mainstream media companies are mostly controlled by political parties, with many prominent politicians having just openly expressed their fear of blogs) etc.

A closer look in Malaysia: well known blogging personalities like Jeff Ooi, Liew Cheong Fong, Kenny Sia, Irfan Khairi, Fione Tan, Terrence Smith etc. seemingly have yet to majorly outsource the content creation for their respective blogs, although such outsourcing activities are starting to be buzzed around. Still, Samsul Zamzuri for instance, a recently featured blogger in the New Straits Times, mentioned collaborative activities between him and partners from around the world for maintaining several of his web sites. Gobala Krishnan, another featured blogger in the same NST article published last month, also openly advertised freelancing positions to grow his blog empire with sites that specialized in topics like internet marketing (at his self-named website), internet technology (e.g. VoIP and WordPress CMS), music & entertainment news (i.e. offering trivias on artists like The Rolling Stones, the Beastie Boys, Prince, Marvin Gay etc. while also lashing out a few: like Metallica), and network marketing.

A good start, would you say? It's more like a tip of the iceberg for what oursourcing or crowdsourcing would offer for bloggers especially or for entrepreneurs in general.

BTW, if you're wondering how much a freelancing blogger/webmaster/internet marketer can ultimately earn, try peeking at Paula Mooney's list of blogger's salaries - quite a number of Malaysians made it to the list of 120 individuals with their claimed/estimated yearly income, starting with Shamzul Zamzuri at #10, Gobala (#34), Victor Yusop (#47), Paul Tan (#49), Liew CF (#59) , Chan Lilian (#64) and MenJ (#67) in the world! -- Shamzul who has been blogging since August 2005 however openly denied the gross estimation put at up to well over US$300,000 making him a clear Internet millionaire every year (in Ringgit Malaysia, that is), claiming that he actually makes more like 20% of such amount which would still be higher than salaries earned by many entry-level engineers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, business managers etc. who work full-time on various company sites throughout Malaysia -- not too bad for someone working from home, eh?

If you'd ask me why we have so many Malaysians ranking high in the list of wealthiest bloggers / micro-netpreneurs, I'd say perhaps we really do have many of them. After all, according to Alexa, and confirmed by Friendster's PR, Malaysians do supply the biggest traffic (20+%) to Friendster, one of the leading social network in the world, and members numbering over three million (7% of Friendsters). Many other social network and sites/forums on money-making information are also flocked by significant Malaysians as their audience -- Pajamanation is more of a business network, or more specifically, a business consulting marketplace for home-based work/business, rather than a social or infopreneurial network, but still promotes "make money online" (or on the Internet/from home) and hence also enjoys this Malaysia-centric audience exceeding 20% according to Alexa (The real traffic is more like 7% though). A true SEO-aware blogger, Chan Lilian even pointed out in her blog on how she prestigiously get here 5xmom site to be in the first page of Google search for "make money" (searched over 100,000 times per month in Yahoo Overture network alone). OR... We Malaysians, in the overhyped spirit of Malaysia Boleh, just love to brag, thinking that those tax agency men from LHDN will be quite slow in catching up to collect their share out of Internet-driven revenue (unlike say, US counterpart, the IRS that seems to be very effective at catching up with tax evaders). You do realize that get-rick-quick schemes and illegal HYIP operators are actively being pursued by the government men, right? Soon, it'll be bloggers and website operators. A note of advice: If you blog for money, you'd better register yourself as a business entity with SSM and do file tax report to LHDN every year -- closing in soon to end date of 30 JUNE (for individuals with additional non-salary earnings) this year!

FOR BLOG OWNERS OUT THERE: Would you or would you know outsource your blog writing?

Outsourcing of city reporting: Will it become a trend?

This news/blog headline caught my eyes a couple weeks or so ago -- A catchy question indeed. I skimmed through the story and bookmarked it.

Like many, the only major thing I can recall of Pasadena, the small town outskirt of Los Angeles that's suddenly being buzzed about by so many American journalists today, is it's being a host to world's famous Rose "American College Football" Bowl game and the Tournament of Roses Parade in the morning of the same game day -- I was there myself once having just driven some 3,000+ miles during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadhan, to watch Michigan Wolverine clinching its controversial National Championship title on 1 JAN 1998 (yes, my Muslim friends and I had to stand up throughout all three hours of the game, cheering for our favorite sports team, without any eating or drinking in between until fast-breaking time by the game's end time!).

I didn't had the time to truly explore this story which turned out to have been made a huge topic within the journalists' world during the past five plus weeks, prompting mentioning in over 50,000 web pages and discussion group posts as of today, as observed through a test Google search. The story also traveled progressively into dozens of mainstream media -- TV, magazines, newspapers and news agregators throughout the months of May and June until this week.

Pasadena (US):What began as a simple business decision for Pasadena, California web publisher Jason Macpherson to outsource some of his news writing to a couple of reporters in India has become a major media debate.

Macpherson, the publisher of Pasadena Now that covers news and current affairs in the southern California town near Los Angeles, is now dealing with both bouquets and brickbats for his decision to hire two reporters in Mumbai and Bangalore to write about city council meetings.

Read more at BPOwatchIndia which took the story from Indo Asia News Service (IANS) -- credited for this blog post's title.

The story was perhaps first written by Justin Prichard with assistance from Matthew Rosenberg (contributing from New Delhi, India), both of whom are writers for the Associated Press, and published as early as Thursday, 10 MAY 2007.

The job posting in Craiglist wrote "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA.", an advertisement supposedly made by James MacPherson, editor and publisher of a two-year old Pasadena-based website, Pasadena Now (The post is no longer on Craiglist website as of now).

Prichard dictates, "Outsourcing first claimed manufacturing jobs, then hit services such as technical support, airline reservations and tax preparation. Now comes the next frontier: local journalism."

With regards to his decision, Macpherson explained, "Whether you're at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, you're still just a phone call or e-mail away from the interview."

"Pasadena city spokeswoman Ann Erdman said coverage from afar shouldn't pose problems if the articles are well-edited. In any case, she said, 'Local government is certainly not in the practice of dictating to local business whom they can hire and where those employees should live.' (AP, 10may07)

The next day, Newsweek published a telephone interview with Macpherson tackling on the issues of "How it plans to cover city-council meetings from afar, and why local journalists are unimpressed."

The job details, as MacPherson enthusiastically revealed to Newsweek's Andrew Murr: "both writers are responsible for producing two 500-word [news] articles a day, six days a week, plus two feature stories each week, which will be a little bit longer, probably 700 words. The most expensive reporter is getting $1,000 a month, in U.S. dollars... (the less expensive reporter) is getting around $600 a month, a little bit over."

Just days later however, one day before the official launch of the stories by the two new reporters, a man from Mumbai and a woman from Bangalore, AP reported that MacPherson who "has been so overwhelmed by handling reaction to his plan that he had to postpone publication of their first stories." (Monday, 14 MAY 2007).

"Since then, Macpherson has spoken with more newspapers, TV and radio stations than he can name and hasn't had time to do interview requests from as far away as Australia and France. Hundreds of responses nearly shut down his e-mail account and vaulted pasadenanow.com from obscurity to a destination for those wondering what was going on." (Associated Press)

Barbara Enrenreich, an author of several best-selling books and a contributing writer for several publications including the New York Times, Harpers and Time magazine, blasted, "Excuse me, but isn't this more or less what former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for - pretending to report from sites around the country while he was actually holed up in his Brooklyn apartment?"

Two weeks after this news first broke out, Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, a San Francisco-based associate editor of PBS MediaShift, elaborated at length on why outsourcing local news to India might not work, citing preventive reasons summarized into four phrases: distance, cultural differences, trust and lack of savings.

As Pritchard highlighted in the original news story, Maderazo continued analyzing the earlier case with British news agency Reuters running "an operation in the technology capital of Bangalore that churns out Wall Street stories based on news releases (AP)", which on the other hand, have worked decently well since 2004. Maderazo's in-favor arguments with regards to outsourcing to India includes availability of high quality labor, optimized use of technology and more local content (than not at all!).

Now, what does all these buzzes have anything to do with Pajamanation? If you have been a reader of this blog for some time now, you would have guessed that Pajamanation, instead manufacturing, trading or selling pajamas or any other textiles, promote work-from-home or fractional work culture, which for decades have been closely associated with freelancing, outsourcing or offshoring.

Not quite!

The problem with traditional outsourcing (the 80s stigma!) in the case of American industries targeting purported considerable savings through cheaper labor like in India is the possibility of shipping away legitimate jobs from one nation to another which would be deemed as a societal havoc to many nationalists of a particular country. But what if the so-called employment wouldn't exist anyway if the particular work assignment isn't outsourced?

Furthermore, the enticement for Malaysian companies to oursource jobs to offshore wouldn't be as grand as US-based ones to India or even Malaysia. After all, our local labors are still rather affordable for most employers -- Enter inshoring that made wave since the late 90s. The problem with inshoring however, Malaysia seems to lack of local talents or micropreneurs to insource such fractional work assignments. Hence, modeled after the success of Elance and Guru.com perhaps, it should be a simple job to assemble sufficient Malaysia-based talents, just by having a solid local presence for marketing and support. But, doesn't that means that jobs will also get stolen from corporations and SMEs to micropreneurs and freelancers, even though the jobs don't get shipped out of the country? A societal havoc, locally too!

If we have learned enough from the Open Source culture since the early 90s, and the Web 2.0 wave all through the past decade, crowdsourcing is the new in-thing and it's here to stay. Unlike outsourcing or even insourcing, new microjobs are continuously being created by the community of microworkers themselves, instead of being handed over by corporations. Many of these microworking community members, ended up become micropreneurs and later turn their crowdsourced work into a legitimate profit-making businesses or even large business entities like Redhat, YouTube, Friendster, Myspace, Digg, Del.icio.us, Imeem etc. and not-for-profit entities like Ubuntu and Wikipedia.

But are crowdsourcing only for creating Web 2.0 sites? Not for long! Back to original talk about journalism, imagine establishing your own, solid web-based media like PasadenaNow, or in our local case, MalaysiaKini, MalaysiaToday and TheCicak. To earn their share of loyal audience in the industry that is already saturated with the sites that are backed by mainstream media corporations like Media Prima, Utusan Group, Astro, Karangkraf, The Star, Harakah or Bernama, these indy sites need original pieces and site maintenance that would require tens/hundreds of employees completing varied tasks including but not limited to graphics design, writing, transcription, translating, editing, photographing, server maintenance, marketing, PR, support, sales, accounting, investigative reporting, videocaster, audiocaster, post-production, programming, miscellaneous secretarial work, and the list goes on to cover perhaps 100+ tasks/micro assignments.

If each employee is to be paid at least RM 20,000 a year, employing 20 employees would consume RM 400,000 a year just for salaries. Added with the cost for a modest office setup and operation, another RM 50-200K is needed. Not a small, independent business anymore, eh? And what happened if you need to scale down operations after six months -- not a good move if you were to lay people off -- these people depended solely on you, the employer for food on their tables!

With crowdsourcing using tools like Pajamanation.com however, you can build a scalable business with 1-5 permanent staff, and 'employing' dozens to 100+ microworkers and/or outsourcing short-term assignments to micropreneurs, both local and foreign-based, and still complete your projects, i.e. this independent media website, within controlled cost and time.

If one is bold enough, he or she as a micropreneur and project manager can also venture into offline media like publishing own magazines and newsletters (if not complete newspapers). Consider that every major cities like Georgetown, Ipoh, Alor Star, Kota Bharu down to Kuantan, Shah Alam, Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur, Bandar Melaka, Seremban and Johor Bahru and further to Kota Kinabalu, Miri and Kuching can have their own local newspapers. Heck, even small towns or less dense districts like Padang Besar, Sintok, Jitra, Kulim, Langkawi, Balik Pulau, Bayan Baru, Sg. Ara, Butterworth, Taiping, Manjung, Selayang, Kajang, Sepang, Putrajaya, Jasin, Jelebu, Pekan, Cameron Highlands, Kerteh, Besut, Tumpat, Pasir Mas, Skudai, Muar, Batu Pahat, Labuan, Sandakan, Tawau, Lahad Datu, Sibu, Bintulu etc. can also have their own town papers and miscellaneous local periodicals -- Remember MacPherson's PasadenaNow for the small town of Pasadena (and tens of thousands other local publications for respective towns across the USA and around the world)? How about the dozens of student campuses for higher learning institutes in Malaysia too that seem to clearly lack the voices of the 600,000+ students at any time of the year?

And why stop at just print media? If getting a broadcast-to-air license might prove to be almost impossible, podcasting could be a good avenue to deliver your audio and video content to the local audience.

Who are going to take these challenges to deliver to their local community (what present mainstream media CAN'T!) ? Pajamanation Malaysia wants to recruit at least 100 micropreneurs and 1,000 microworkers from every states of Malaysia.

And what's next after news reporting? Try books, advertising and marketing, financial services, secretarial work, creative content creation, software development, product design, biotech research, electronics testing and see where I'm going? (The sky's the limit!)

Macpherson: 'We’re online. We have to be very lean and mean.'

The question is, are you a future-driven entrepreneur? Join us: Register today!

(At the time I'm posting this blog entry, Pajamanation has registered well over 2,000 potential microworkers from well over 50 countries -- Malaysia, as one of the top-10 countries in terms of members and visitorship, contribute about 7% of total new registrants and daily web traffic).

Related stories:-

• Outsourcing Journalism to China -- The editorial bureau was launched in Maria Trombly's "Shanghai apartment... the real action is online."
  


• Fons Tuinstra's "Caught between the Cold War and the Internet" (PDF - Nieman Reports, Fall 2004)
  


• Outsourcing Journalism to Malaysia? ;-)(

Two is better, more than two is the best!

Looking at the mainstream media - the Malaysian TV stations, the locally published newspapers and the popular magazines, one would think that Malaysians don't spend that much time online. What I continue to discover however: there seem to be so many Malaysians out there dominating Web 2.0 communities. Friendster, a social network is one of them; Ryze and Ecademy for business network.; So are MyBlogLog, SpicyPage, Technorati etc. And the millions of Malaysian Internet users "dig" big media too -- songs and videos. They flock YouTube and along with Filipinos and Singaporeans, they also become one of the biggest audience of Imeem, the latest YouTube-meets-Friendster craze for Malaysians.

They surely do talk about everything, including work. But will most of us pajamaworking at home continue to work alone, or explore the possibility to actually work in a group of many -- not just 2-3 collaboration, but in a corporation-like manner: say, six or more on a project.

Can tools like Pajamanation.com be one of the platform for such net-WORK-ing?

The era of big software is over

The era of big software is over by ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn -- When you're building solutions based on parts, you upgrade based on modules, or by combining modules. You're reluctant to change what sits below the modules because that impacts all the dependencies above. So you don't.

Pajamaworking at home... where in Malaysia?

BALIK PULAU: For many Malaysians, the idea for pajamaworking might sound foreign. After all, how can a person earn a decent income working in pagoda t-shirt (or any other comfy shirt), matched with a pelekat/batik/sarong or a short/track-bottom? But we sure do know that in the United States alone, there are well over ten million home-based workers, with some millions of them rely primarily on the Internet to earn their primary monthly income (with at least 700,000 of Americans using primarily eBay to trade).

The truth however, for hundreds of years, there have been 100,000s of micropreneurs in Malaysia (at least four times more than SME & corporations), many of whom are in trade and retail business of products and services, running mom and pops shops/offices and warongs, in cities/towns, colleges and villages, even until today! Take a look at the hundreds of pasar malams (night markets) held every single day (except during Eid) throughout Malaysia, and the shops where the workers practically are wearing 'pajamas' during the mornings, afternoons or even late nights. But every Malaysian knows that, right? Not many Malaysians can possibly be using ICT to earn any decent monthly income at home! Or so as some might have argued! (We however do know that they are thousands of "All Malaysian" bloggers and Internet marketers out there with hundreds of whom, have claimed to currently make quite a whopping income, even exceeding RM 20,000 a month!)

When I first imported this very pajamaworking idea to Malaysia, I knew that I wasn't alone... I've earlier gotten acquainted with many pajamaworkers and micropreneurs (throughout the 10+ years I've been operating several IT businesses from home), who are indeed earning handsome income through the use of ICT (be it the Internet or mobile communications technologies) at their home/SOHO . In 1999, I hired my first Malaysian pajamaworker working in Troy, NY, while I was running a web solutions company in Ann Arbor, MI, some hundreds of kilometers away. Today, from small towns of (non MSC-status) Balik Pulau and Sintok (MSC-status in some sense), with effective crowdsourcing tools like Pajamanation, I'm hiring even many more pajamaworkers in Malaysia and also in foreign lands including in USA, Germany, India and Uruguay.

Today, Pajamanation is already a network spreading across borders, starting with 53 nations by end of its inaugural year, 2006 and to be grown progressively. By June 2007, the largest audience of Pajamanation come from Venezuela, Belgium, Germany, United States, Israel, Portugal, Malaysia (#7), Hong Kong, Kenya, United Kingdom and 80+ other countries. Pajamanation.com is also one of the most visited web destinations in Kenya (Top-60!), Malaysia (Top-3000), Venezuela, Singapore, UK, US and 20+ other countries. -- SEE Google Analytics map above marked with more than 700 cities where Pajamanation's visitors come from (led by Caracas, Brussels, Lisbon, Petah Tiqwa, Dusseldorf, Kuala Lumpur (#6!), Hong Kong, Nairobi and Haifa)!

As one of the dozens of Pajamanation's business partners since 2006, my task is to grow this new global business venture particularly in its marketing & public relations in Malaysia. The goal is to empower tens of thousands of micropreneurs & home-based workers in Malaysia to connect to a local or even worldwide pool of micro projects offered by similar entities or large organizations. Let's see how Pajamanation Malaysia is doing so far after just slightly over two months since local launch: We have reached at least fourteen cities including Kuala Lumpur, Alor Star, Kuantan, Batu Pahat, Petaling Jaya, Kajang, Kelang, Georgetown/Pulau Pinang, Ipoh, Johor Bahru, Kota Bharu, Kulai, Shah Alam and Miri. And we're going to more states and cities over the next few months, and we'll be needing you! Help us, help Malaysia be #1 in this new, thrivingly bold industry, which will revolutionize the way people in the future, WORK! Pajamanation will make the traditional all-employment culture, obsolete... And soon, small nations like Malaysia can really compete, globally!

Welcome to the World Wide Work! The whole world is mine. Check us out & REGISTER TODAY, FREE. And help us spread the words... Thank you in advance!

Together, everyone achieve more -- that's T.E.A.M. by the way!


Regards,

Nasir Sobri
Pajamanation Malaysia

What do you think of Pajamanation?

I've talked quite a lot about Pajamanation the past couple months. Do you have idea what it is by now? And how it will affect the world in a big way in the near future, as it already is affecting thousands today? Will you be affected by it?

Read what others are saying abouts us:

• Léon Benjamin at WinningBySharing.net: Fractional Work. The next small thing? & a much earlier article entitled Fractional Work Debuts and; a follow-up review by David Wilcox at Designing for Civil Society: Fractional work and small slices of expertise
• Mark Fletcher at StartUpping.com: Keys to Outsourcing Success (Part 1)
• "djozi-bo" at her LiveJournal blog (in Russian)
• Audrey Golub at MilanIn Business Club
• Adamson Rust at TheInquire.net: Job site lets you work in your pajamas / Teletrabajo en pijama (Spanish)
• David Cohn at NewAssignment.net: Assignment Zero Reactions
• Matt Mower at Blogs.It
• Personal Development for Smart PeopleTM Forums

"...will we see the likes of MediaBistro, Pajama Nation and Gumtree (an eBay company, no less) becoming the next Manpower or Adecco? ", Leon Benjamin wrote on March 12, 2006.


And it's presently bookmarked by 70 people at Del.icio.us.

Read more about "Freelancing on the Internet" at Wikipedia.

What do you think about it? How may we improve it to make it work for you? Help us, help you... (Thank you in advance!)


BTW, you're welcome to talk about Pajamanation, and let us know by commenting here... (get the words out of your review page).