As a Director of Marketing here at MoveYourWeb it falls under my radar to update and maintain our own corporate web site. The shame thing is that our portfolio section was really outdated (yeah in bold). We do have the set of customers that we work with for many years so they are perfectly aware of our technology expertise as well as solutions that we’ve created. We also have enough management at different levels who are always ready to suggest on the work in specific technology or industry that we’ve accomplished. A big percentage are contacting us thru WOMM so a lot of our new prospects are already educated about our company’s services and past work.

Anyway there is a still put of prospects coming from sources other than WOMM and it takes our Sales Dpt additional time to compile the list of projects accomplished for specific industry, especially when the same work should be done again and again on a daily basis. So here I go – researching the ways to organize and structure Case Studies section for offshore outsourcing company. 30 companies located in TOP50 Google under a relevant search quarries were reviewed. Find the results of the research below:

1. Downloadable Case Studies – a prospect is able to select the case study of interest and download the pdf by filling out a short form. Service Provider can use this data for further promotions, prospect education by sending relevant promo info to the subscribers thus trying to convert the prospect into a customer with time. The negative aspect of this model is that it takes time to fill the form/check email/open the pdf. The other negative thing is that the Case Studies published are generally presented in a A-Z list rather being structured by industry/technology/etc.

2. Client List – list of customers is published on the web site with additional description of their business. This model is relevant for companies handling small projects (their prospect is luckily to see similar company at the Client List and sign up).

3. Portfolio – list of finished projects, normally provided with the screenshots. The services providers should really choose this model if they are in creative business only. So web design studios and companies should choose it because it allows to reflect the style of the finished work, not the technical details which is critical for complicated projects focused on back-end rather the UI.

4. Case Studies grouped by Services – e.g. web development, software development, emended programming. The prospect is able to quickly find the relevant projects finished by a service provider and estimate the level of vendor’s proficiency. The question that arises is why service providers put Offshore Dedicated Center as a separate service. One customer may hire a team of web developers and another of software guys, the third will be hiring SEO Consultants. Shouldn’t that fall into the Service grouping directly? I think so. Ask me what to do with the Case Studies for Offshore Dedicated Center – don’t include this ‘service’ in a case studies structure at all! From a sales/marketing prospective Offshore Dedicated Center is an engagement model not a standalone service (well unless an ODC is of 20+ full-time people or ‘Build Operate Transfer’ model which is a different story).

5. Case Studies structured by Industry – e.g. banking, real estate, financial. No comments on that – clear for everyone

6. Case Studies by Solution – e.g. CMS, ERP, ecommerce.

7. Case Studies by Platform – e.g. .net, java enterprise. That one speaks for itself as well.

Our choice is to show case studies sorted by 1. Services (the most important and demanded), 2. Industry, 3. Platform and 4. Solution. The ‘Portfolio’ section that we’ve used before will fall under ‘web site design’ and ‘web site development’ services. Coming to production and will be reflected on the web site soon!

Offshore Dedicated Team (ODT) or Staff-based ODC is a relatively new term to name a group of specialists, united into one team to suit the needs of a customer, who is in need of IT developing or designing certain software products or fulfilling back and front office tasks for mainly financial services industry. The offshore dedicated team is usually hired for performing a certain task once or it may be hired on a permanent basis for fulfilling every day routine activities, which are not the essence of the business, but which are nevertheless important. Such teams normally work for a fixed monthly fee.

The members of the offshore dedicated team work under the supervision and control of the customer, and can often be available during the business hours, needed for the customer. That is, the team may work the same hours as the business or they can work at the time, when the customer’s business is not working, thus creating a 24-hour working environment for a firm. Offshore dedicated teams often supervise the business processes on behalf of the customer, which guarantees superior productivity.

Offshore dedicated team providers usually offer their customers software development centers with the newest technologies, often with various cost-reduction plans during all the period of the project. When hiring an offshore dedicated team, the client often gets much more than just professional IT specialists. The problem of keeping a professional IT team together becomes the problem of the offshore center, which again helps save costs. The offshore center also takes care of taxes, which gives further cost savings options. These advantages allow the clients to invest their resources into other important activities, not spending extra time and money on managing the everyday and routine tasks.

Nowadays, offshore centers can offer a great number of offshore dedicated teams, which specialize in several knowledge fields. IT development, web technologies, analytics, front and back office operations, intellectual property services, clinical research, legal research, business research, publishing services, real estate services, case study services, call centers, human recourses, customer care are only some of them.

An offshore dedicated team center is to some extent an extension of the customer’s business office. The center aims at presenting the best skilled work force, facilities, and benefits to their clients, making the necessary operations to protect all the rights of the customers. The offshore dedicated team also offers a cost effective plan for those intending to cooperate on a permanent basis. In this case the team is constantly trained to for the specific needs of a customer, which ensures perfect quality of the services rendered. Finding and selecting the right offshore dedicated team may be a time-taking procedure; however the benefits received by the customer are usually worthwhile.

The countries, which have established the greatest number of knowledge process outsourcing firms, are India, Philippines and China. These countries possess extensive knowledge banks and enough professionals in different fields for fulfilling the knowledge process needs of businesses in the USA. The work of knowledge process outsourcing firms requires profound analytical and highly specialized skills.

It is estimated, that knowledge process outsourcing is rather prospective and is going to grow in the next few years. Most probably, the area of information technology services, which is currently provided by knowledge process outsourcing firms will expand and include such services as intellectual property services, clinical research, legal research, business research, analytics and publishing.

Right now, knowledge process outsourcing firms specialize in the fields of content writing and rewriting, research and development, patent research, pharmaceutical technology, equity research, market research, data research, database management, finance modeling, design and development in various industries, animation, medical reports and services, distance education. Engineers, doctors, attorneys and many other professionals are becoming more and more popular.

Experts of the market research industry have already evaluated all the benefits produced by knowledge process outsourcing firms and have started to outsource the fields in which technology and IT solutions seriously improve the research process. The researches are highly profitable as they are really cost effective. Even small companies can make use of them, not having to increase their budget spending. Therefore, knowledge process outsourcing is a really proven method of quickly boosting the productivity and cost savings in the field of market research.

The article has been taken from Knowledge Process Outsourcing, Ezinearticles authoritative resource

Imagine that your company wants to start a business blog – a blog, which will be a part of the company’s image, and a benefit to your company’s search engine optimization and internet marketing campaign. The first important question that you should answer before launching a blog is: “Who will actually write the contents?” A blog is useless without regularly updated posts… A blog has to be dynamic, brisk and informative; it has to be posted with catching, well-structured, and informative articles. Along with writing the contents, blogging also includes answering comments and building the community, not mentioning the technical aspects of blogging. So before launching a blog, think if you really have a person in your office to do all the things mentioned. Does this person write well? Can he or she find new ideas for regular posts? Can he or she take care of the blog’s templates and plug-ins?…

Instead of appointing a person from the office who has never been involved in blogging professionally, it might be wise to hire a professional blogger.

But who is a professional blogger?

A professional blogger is a person who gets paid for writing consistent posts for your blog. This is a person who has already written hundreds of posts before; a person with vivid imagination and inexhaustible ideas; a person with a perfect command of the language and sense of the language; a person able to play with words, build sentences that flow nice and make lots of sense.

Contracting a professional blogger is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved. If you are still not sure that your company’s estimate should include blogging services, remind yourself of the additional financial revenues that your company will gain through a business blog over time.

Besides, if you are far-sighted enough and buy professional blogging services from an offshore outsourcing company, i.e. MoveYourWeb Offshore Web Development Company, you will benefit twice. You can use great imbalance in global economy to your advantage if you send your outsourced work abroad. It makes sense as it will allow you hire a professional blogger for a more affordable price than in your own country. You see the point? The fees charges by the blogging professional will turn out to be much less than the added revenue or the cost of hiring an additional staff member for blogging.

Having a strong company background, which has been formed for many years, MoveYourWeb has a cohesive team of professional copywriters and bloggers to make your business prosper. Our extensive experience in the sphere of Copywriting, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Marketing helps us create high-quality informative content for various types of businesses from mortgage and real estate to sports and tourism. Our excellent knowledge of the language and language skills along with innovative attitude to everything we do helps us create well-structured sensible and interesting texts as well as be on top of the things happening on the net. Having played with blogs a lot, our professional bloggers will also relieve you from the technical aspects of blogging, or train your staff to maintain the blog.

In a nutshell, outsourcing professional blogging services from a reputable offshore company is certainly a wise solution from all points of view. However, before hiring a professional blogger, make sure you specify some things about the services they offer.

A blogger and copywriter myself, I tried to put myself in my employer’s shoes and create this list of recommendations: What would I be concerned about if I were a blog owner? What posts do I want to see on my blog? How often? What will be the style of my posts?… Below is the list of questions that you should specify before contracting a professional blogger.

1) Have the blogger ever written posts on my topic or on the topic similar to mine?

This is important because the web copywriter should understand the business, and should be able to use the language of your industry. If your industry is that rare, that a blogger with such knowledge can hardly be found, ask your future blogger to carry out a thorough research of the business before writing any posts.

2) Will the posts be optimized for my prime keywords?

Search engine optimization is important for your blog, because being an Internet marketing tool, your blog will help you promote the website of your business. Therefore, ask your blogger to optimize your posts and provide them with up to 7 prime key words or phrases you would like to be searched by.

3) What is the minimum word count per post?

The information you get from different bloggers may vary. Most bloggers write posts no shorter than 250 words. Overall, the optimal text length, which will ensure that your text is informative, well structured, and unobtrusive, is 350-500 words.

4) What type of posts will these be?

Normally, you can distinguish between personal posts, adjunct posts and ghost posts. Personal posts are posts that you write yourself. Adjunct posts are posts that are authored by someone else, and the name of the author will appear under the post. However, your name will be attached to the post. Having such posts on your blog will show the reader that you are getting somebody else’s help in keeping the content fresh. And, finally, the last type of posts is ghost posts. When dealing with ghost posts, you pay somebody to write for you but still have your name under the post. This is the most preferable type of posts from the point of view of a blog owner. You don’t have to write anything, or ask anybody authoritative to place a post on your blog – you just pay the money and get the high-quality post which is to the point and makes sense, and has your name under it showing you as an expert in your field. We are not deepening into moral issues here, it is not our aim now to discuss what is honest and what is not. We are here to make our blog a powerful marketing tool and we are looking at this issue from the point of view of our business. In the business world such type of writing is quite acceptable.

5) Can I review the posts before you post them? And, if I dislike something, will you revise?

This is a very important question to specify with your offshore copywriting company. To make your cooperation solid and effective, you need to discuss such issues in advance. As a rule, companies offering copywriting and blogging services welcome you to make comments and give ideas. You won’t have time to read the posts all the time of course. However, please, draw special attention to the first five posts written for you. You need to adjust the style, to choose the right “voice” of the post, to let the blogger feel what you need. Once you are comfortable with the quality of the posts, you don’t have to review their writing as closely or as frequently.

Besides, you can also provide the blogger with specific links, interesting posts or articles that you may come across on the net and might want your blogger to use for your blog.

6) How often should new posts appear on my blog?

My experience shows that the ideal number of posts per week is five. You have 5 working days in a week – and each day you must say something new. Though you may stop on 3 posts per week. It will be quite okay, too. Keep in mind that you don’t need more than 5 posts per week.

7) Will the professional blogger also take care of comments coming to my blog and handle technical things when necessary?

Very important question. As a rule, blogging companies include this in their blogging services. However, it is always better to clarify.

Above I tried to summarize the main recommendations to a blog owner who has never dealt with bloggers and blogs and who might need some education in this new and exciting sphere. As a blogger myself I know what questions I can expect from the clients and can help the people who are unaware of blogging but who want to get involved in it.

While reading some stuff on outsourcing, I came across a peculiar new title of a Chief Globalization Officer. This position was new to me, and I thought that it might be new to somebody else, too. So, I got down to my next article for the blog, which, as I decided, would be dedicated to this new C position.

The necessity of creating this new position was conditioned by the fact that many companies that work on an international level are very often puzzled when it comes to the real issues of targeted or online marketing with a local flavor. In fact, “website globalization puts this issue front and center as firms market their brand and wares through their corporate URLs”. Companies often lack a high profile specialist to control the messaging, budget, technology infrastructure, and other key elements for the channel of global communication and commerce.

It happens that this is exactly a CGO who should take upon all these duties. The CGO is often compared to that second steady hand: the catalyst for global thinking, and responsiveness.

The CGO’s main functions include:

1) to form a corporate global mindset to help the organization enter new markets, and maintain competitiveness in those markets for many years to come;

2) to pursue the best global leadership talent to be able to respond to local conditions;

3) to continuously improve organizational structures to meet local conditions;

4) to conduct the management of knowledge and information, and utilize it through the best use of technology.

The first company to appoint a Chief Globalization Officer outside the US is American Cisco Systems, Inc. With that, one more C level position has been created in corporate America. Wim Elfink, the first professional Cisco’s Chief Globalization Officer will go to Bangalore and work from there, thus creating the first CGO job in Corporate America outside its borders; i.e offshore.

According to Mr Elfink, as a Chief Globalization Officer, he will be in charge of “executing the growth strategy for the company globally, including collaborating with Cisco’s worldwide functional leaders to innovatively globalize and scale all functions by leveraging their work in India as a platform”.

Besides, he will take up elaborating disruptive business models for Cisco to create new markets, go-to-market channels, and technologies. Additionally, he is planning to carry out an analysis of possible implementation of Cisco’s $1.1billion investment in India. He emphasizes that developing and strengthening existing partnerships with Indian IT partners on a global scale is of vital importance to Cisco. The reason is not only that India’s market is growing for Cisco products and services. In fact, India was chosen due to many other factors. First, India is an open culture, unlike, say, China. It is well known for its strong sense of partnership, which is beneficial for implementing Cisco’s globalization strategy. Secondly, it has educated workforce, innovative customers, and skilled partners that have global capabilities. Finally, India’s government pays much attention to economic development across all levels of society.

Overall, time will show if the position of a Chief Globalization Officer justifies itself. However, already now it is clear that with the development of the modern global economy, and growing availability of the offshoring services, this new C position can become irreplaceable for implementing modern globalization strategy.

Everything started from outsourcing. Companies began to shift some part of their workload (everything but core business activities, like human resources, catering and security) to outside companies within national boundaries. Some time later businesses realized that because of great imbalance in global economy, they could cut down their costs by sending their outsourced work abroad, i.e. to a row of developing countries where the cost of labor is much cheaper than in post-industrial countries. That is how the idea of offshoring was born. First, low-skilled service jobs like telephone call centres, component assembly were shifted abroad; then businesses began to handle more complicated intellectual tasks over to other countries.

The arrival of the digital age has contributed to another notion in a business sphere - Offshoring 2.0. Since, digital communications have become more affordable, many partner offshoring companies have become able to do much more for their clients than before. “In the very near future, for small and medium size businesses, having partners in the Pacific Basin will no longer seem exotic, but the norm”, Research Director of the Economic Research Council Dan Lewis says.

If later, outsourcing companies were involved in all kinds of outsourcing, and used to take up any task that was offered to them, now they have become selective, or better say, they have become more specialized. So what differs Offshoring 2.0 from offshoring is narrow specialization. Today there is a number of offshoring companies, which handle only one particular type of tasks, i.e. bookkeeping, software development, web development, engineering, financial analysis etc. It has been estimated that up to 40 percent of currently outsourced jobs, could be next in a row to be sent offshore. Such professional classes as lawyers, accountants, medical practitioners, computer programmers and even financial analysts – can soon lose their jobs for the reason that their work will be outsourced to outside countries! There is something to think about…

Offshoring 2.0 is typical not only for the countries of the Pacific basin, as mentioned by Dan Lewis, but also for CEE (Central and Eastern Europe). Many of the firms in Belarus, Ukraine, and Bulgaria started creating companies that even though smaller than the end-to-end offshore companies, but are becoming quite large as specialized companies. Let’s take Moveyourweb Web Development IT Outsourcing Company as a vivid example of a modern, rapidly growing and professional Offshoring 2.0 company. We deal with only one IT branch, which is web development, including a variety of related services:

- web design;

- web development;

- search engine optimization;

- logo design and corporate identity design;

- Offshore Dedicated Center.

But no more than that. Being focused on only one branch of Information Technologies, the company gets a splendid opportunity to master certain IT skills and, thus, perform their job on a highly professional level. Rather than taking up everything without having profound knowledge and enough experience, having narrow specialization, we believe, is more advantageous to us and our clients.

Offshoring 2.0 is just starting to open up huge opportunities. This method of optimization of many foreign business processes keeps gaining popularity, and promises to become the greatest business paradigm of the XXI century.

Outsourcing seems to have recently become a buzz term in the business sphere. Actually, it is not only the word, which has become so popular, but also the process itself. The reality is that many respected businesses aim at outsourcing their business processes. The number of businesses in various industries shifting their work to outside parties is astonishing! If so, outsourcing process must bring quite huge financial benefits to the people introducing it into their businesses.

The very essence of outsourcing is in the wish of many companies to get rid of a significant part of their workload shifting it to third parties. This idea proved to become not that bad, and, therefore, more and more companies bring themselves to trusting outside companies with some part of their work. Furthermore, with the development of the Internet and growing availability of many online services, the work is handled over to outside countries, sometimes, even quite distant: Belarus, India, Pakistan etc. Why is it happening?

The truth is that many developed countries experience lack of qualified and talented professionals, people who are willing to do their job with enthusiasm and proper care. Besides, an employer must pay quite good money to qualified work force in developed countries, which is not always profitable for a company. Here outsourcing to developing countries might become a perfect solution. Imagine, if all work is outsourced to the countries that have immense qualified labour force able to complete your projects perfectly and at lower rates. For instance, if you usually pay a professional in your country about a hundred dollars for doing some qualified job, you will have to pay about twenty dollars to professionals who will do the same job for you through a third party.

Besides, offshore outsourcing industry offers another nice opportunity of organizing your business process in Offshore IT Outsourcing market - Offshore Dedicated Center. The major financial benefit of ODC establishment is that it will save you up to 70% of IT spending by reducing employment costs, contract and project execution. Therefore, if your company is focused on IT, maybe, you should establish an ODC to make your working process more effective, and cheap! It’s your virtual IT department that works produce the product of same or even improved quality but at 1/4 of the cost.

Of course, the fact that so many businesses undertake outsourcing does not mean that you also need it. Before taking up this important decision, you should evaluate if you will really benefit from outsourcing. To do that you will most likely need to consider a number of various factors of your business. First, think carefully if you are comfortable with handling major part of your work over to third parties. The problem is that together with your work requirements and specifications, you will be handing over all the financial details of your business, and so you must establish full trust with the third party firm that is going to perform the work for you.

Secondly, any outsourcing company you choose for working on your projects must have the best security features to protect your personal information and data. Here, references are extremely important. You will need to find out if other firms and companies have previously cooperated with that outsourcing company and if they are satisfied with the results of the outsourcing process. If you get positive feedback on the work of that company, and if you are satisfied with other queries that you have made, go ahead and start outsourcing!

Besides, it is very positive when an outsourcing company let you check the quality of the work performed by its employees before you sign your contract. You can give an outsourcing company a kind of a test (some piece of work) to find out if the quality of their work is good enough for you. If you are not satisfied with the work done by them, you can always say ‘no’, and go search for some other company that will better meet your working standards.

Overall, from the financial point of view, outsourcing is a profitable process to undertake in your business. It helps cut down costs keeping the quality of the work done on the same level as before, and sometimes, even higher. However, think twice before choosing the outsourcing company to work for you. Scan through their official website, examine their portfolio, make the necessary inquiries about the company and only then get in contact with the company’s sales rep.

Leading outsourcing providers have always been targeting huge companies, monsters, understand their needs and then arranging a system somewhere in India to meet their needs. With the market saturation and continuing growth of the industry new challenging companies started to appear targeting their activities towards work with the medium-sized and even small customers.

Time when start-up can use foreign talent and thus make the company competitive is a reality now. Imagine the company that has only $50.000 at start and can spend those $$ on two man-hours of development in the USA or 40 man-hours in Belarus or Russia – what will you choose?

Many small businesses still ignore the possibility of outsourcing because of the risks and time involved setting up a beneficial relationship with another firm. But the potential profits may make the risk worthwhile. The new generation of outsourcing-consulting companies should appear now! Those that will be able to organize effective interaction with the business owners: explaining them the benefits of outsourcing and setting up the relationship with the offshore outsourcing provider. According to InformationWeek Research’s most recent Priorities survey of 100 small and 100 midsize companies, 9% of small businesses and 6% of midsize businesses say implementing or increasing offshore outsourcing was on their radar for this year.

The growing number of consultants with offshoring experience is growing quickly, allowing companies who do not have the size or resources to devote full time employees for offshoring management the opportunity to get into the game.  As the number of offshoring consultants grow, competition increases and both the services they offer and costs they charge improve. 

Silicon.com Reports:

Small businesses are likely to get the same purported benefits from outsourcing as large ones, including low costs, competitive advantage and the ability to focus on core business.