Abstract
Outsourcing & Prototyping in Geo-spatial System Development
VK Panchal
Addl. Director / Scientist ‘F’
Defence Terrain Research Lab,
Email: [email protected]
Outsourcing is now a winning strategy for forward and aggressive thinking managements. Reducing the cost has become a trivial factor rather value addition to the business is on the main focus. It enables organizations to concentrate on their core business, carry out business reengineering, and provide information that is valid, timely, and adequate to assist decision making at the management level and quality and cost control at the middle and lower levels. Technology, like internet, is diminishing global distances to the point where, in reality, having work performed halfway around the world is not much different from having it done in an office building across the street. Outsourcing has emerged as the single most powerful tool for companies seeking to stay competitive.
In the recent years, Indian geo-spatial community has created its signature in the area of Information technology (IT) global outsourcing activities. Our main strength lies in, high quality of education, Language authority on English enabling the country to take advantage of the current international demand for remote development and IT outsourcing ahead of competitors like China, state-of-the-art infrastructure, higher productivity , quality of service, 24×7 service, and reduced costs. In the past few years, India has become the hub of IT-enabled Services with many Fortune 500 companies outsourcing their customer care and BPO centers to either third party companies based in India or setting up a captive center.
The last two years (2005 & 2006) are rightly considered a watershed for the geospatial sector because of the general recognition that geospatial has joined the IT mainstream. Outsourcing is yet restricted to the classical GIS services like, map digitization, spatial database generation, which are relatively labour intensive and are well defined and deterministic. We feel that research areas in geospatial domain are partially touched upon. Intelligent Geospatial System development is a mix of research segment in its symbiotic and dominant technologies related to machine intelligence, referential remote sensing, context understanding, net-centric complexities, interoperability, open standards. In this paper we propose a methodology how we can handle a research outsourced proposal in an efficient and effective fashion. It is also proposed that inherent potential embedded in the prototype concept can be explored in understanding of initially fuzzy, ambiguous requirements, when the customer has a legitimate need but is clueless about the details. The quick design facilitated by prototyping paradigm, focuses on representation of software that will be visible to the customer (like human-computer interface). This not only will develop customer confidence but at the same time enabling the developer to better understand what needs to be done.
The solution to global outsourcing does not lie in protection, but in innovation. Research Outsourcing will open up new opportunity space avenues not only to the mid-level companies but also provide opportunities to potential creative intellectual exasperate manpower. Also, promoting the inherent human desire to innovate and excel is the way to preserve competitive edge is another objective of research outsourcing. Also, this may results in an influx of patents and Indian contributions in global decision thriving bodies that definitely will project the tangible return on investment in research outsourcing.
