Opinion: Why I don't trust offshore customer service

Silicon.com
How comfortable are you with giving your personal details to call centre staff in foreign countries? Simon Moores doesn't like it one bit. Something hasn't been quite right with the Barclays online banking site this week. As I write this column, I'll 'ping' it one more time to be sure - and the result is a 'no response from server' message, so all is not well in the wonderful world of online finance. Being curious as to the cause and wanting to know if a client payment had made its way by Bacs into my business account, I decided to call the Barclays helpline. This was answered by a pleasant young woman with an Indian accent, who requested my online account information. more...

Tech predictions for 2010

Economic Times
Techies who want to lead businesses will find it easier to climb up the ladder of corporate success in 2010. According to a study by management consultants Deloitte, called "Eye to the Future — How Technology, Media and Telecommunications Advances Could Change the Way We Live in 2010", technology will become really important in a few years. The report outlines how technology will affect our everyday lives by 2010. The growing ubiquity of technology will have a number of impacts on our everyday lives. Here, according to Deloitte, is how your daily life will be affected by 2010: Techie rules the roost By 2010 technical skills will be more sought after than ever, according to the study. Tech professionals will find it easier to climb the corporate ladder by the end of the decade. Those with a greater degree of technological literacy may find themselves moving up the corporate hierarchy more quickly than those without. more...

Why do IT projects fail?

Economictimes.com
Sagarika Gupta, a project manager in a leading IT company, was thrilled when she got a large software project. She had the best people in the team. And she was promised bonuses if the project went well. But unfortunately clients rejected it. Her boss assumed that she had not put best efforts in the project, although she knew she had. It was a failure - and worse, she had no assurance that she would do any better on the next project. If this scenario sounds familiar, you're not alone. Repeated studies have shown that the failure rate for IT projects is more than 50 per cent. This is tolerated only because software is vital to the running of modern organisations. Today three out of four projects are still failing. Why, though, do these failures occur? And why project managers (PM) are held responsible to it? How can corporate India deal with project mismanagement? One would claim that every project that fails is the result of poor management. A poorly funded or ill-conceived project will fail regardless of the skills of the project manager or project team. Projects that lack buy-in from top management are doomed, as are projects that lack ties with company objectives or that have no clear return on investment. Sometimes a shift in business priorities requires that certain projects be abandoned. But project mismanagement plays a significant role in many project failures. more...

Know how much Infy top earner makes?

EconomicTimes.com
S D Shibulal, the US-based founder-director and promoter of Infosys, leads the pack among the company directors in terms of pay-packets with an annual salary of $1.6 lakh (Rs 71 lakh at an exchange rate of Rs 44.9), according to the filings made by Infosys with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other directors, it is the former CFO and incumbent HR head, TV Mohandas Pai who ranks as the second highest paid director with a pay packet of $41,815 (Rs 18.78 lakh) in FY06. He even tops the other directors in terms of bonus/incentive payout in FY06 which stood at $1 lakh or Rs 45.6 lakh. The other four directors including Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani drew a salary of $29,355 (Rs 13.2 lakh per annum) during FY06. Both the chief mentor and the MD of the company received a similar bonus payout of $ 45,925. Incumbent chief financial officer of the company, V Balakrishnan, drew a salary of $29,946 with $64,762 as bonus/incentive in FY06. Infosys, which launched Infosys Consulting in April ’04, has invested $7m in FY06 in this arm, taking the total investment to $17m. more...