Harnessing the collective intelligence of people has the potential to change everything. Today, teams numbering in the thousands are creating encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items. Perhaps the best example is the rise of Wikipedia, which harnessed the collective intelligence of people around the world to produce a reference that rivals the Encyclopedia Britannica.What if companies applied the same principles to the world of work? What if every business could leverage the collective intelligence of its employees, partners, suppliers and customers to build better products and deliver better service? It's exactly this vision that motivated Michael Rocha and Timothy Chou to found Openwater Networks.
Openwater has built a social network for work, something it calls a service network, to connect the islands of experts and expertise. Openwater Networks partnered with Augmentum because it shared the same vision of using a service network to change the way they work together, which Frank Yu, president and COO of Augmentum, and Timothy call "IT Outsourcing 2.0." The result: "Together we were able to build innovative software that would have cost us 10 times more money and 10 times more time if we had done it under ITO 1.0," says Chou.
All thee men had a lot of experience with the first generation of outsourcing. In fact, Rocha started Oracle's India operations. (Oracle was one of the first major software companies to locate operations in India.) Chou says ITO 1.0 "was largely a move to low-cost labor countries. Cheap labor was the central tenet."
But ITO 2.0 is not about sending work to the cheapest guy, in Chou's view. Instead, "it's about moving the work to where the best brains are."
As any good software company does, Openwater used its service network to build the service network software. That network today consists of developers in London, Romania, Olathe (Kansas), San Francisco, and Shanghai.
Source: Outsourcing Journal, http://www.outsourcing-journal.com