Outsource Bulgaria

At her recent presentation at the Symposium ITxpo, Gartner analyst Linda Cohen officially announced the death of outsourcing:

You have to stop outsourcing now! Research suggests that 50 percent of outsourcing contracts signed during the last three years will fail to meet expectations.

The reason for the failure of outsourcing seems obvious, if you ask Cohen: most organizations are utilizing ad-hoc approaches to outsourcing that are both short-sighted and ineffective.

Corporations go offshore because investors like the concepts of outsourcing.

Too often, the teams that end up managing multiple contracts lack the experience and the governance discipline to complete the projects successfully.

Linda Cohen and Allie Young have published a book on the subject, Multisourcing: Moving beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility. The book identifies eight myths of outsourcing, I’ll highlight three:

1. The enemy: Thinking of the service provider as an enemy to defeat in contract negotiations.
2. Procurement: The notion that best price is the key metric, discounting other important factors.
3. Sourcing competency: Believing that the required management capabilities necessary to manage external services exist in house.

The multisourcing model, on the other hand, “seamlessly blends internally and externally delivered services not just to cut costs or gain efficiencies, but to maximize growth, agility, and bottom-line results.”

The book is definitely not the be-all end-all of sourcing books. Ironically, most of the advice inside is taken from recent outsourcing books, some reviewers say. If you don’t have ANY books on outsourcing though, you could as well start by reading this one.

If you’re launching a new site, using Google Sitemaps is a must. The reason is simple – it alerts Google about your existence. Including all your pages in the XML file ensures that Googlebot will have an easier time crawling your site.

Just 10 years ago, all major search engines accepted and highly valued user-submissions. However, page spam killed the goose that laid the golden eggs (i.e. traffic). Nowadays, most of these submissions are either paid or ignored.

Google Sitemaps is a win-win solution. It allows webmasters to let Google know about new pages or sites. At the same time, it cuts down the amount of crawling that Googlebot does (refreshing only pages that have been added or updated).

Creating a sitemap for you site is easy:

1. Sign-up for an account here (if you already have a Google/Gmail account, you don’t need to sign up again)
2. Verify you are the rightful owner of the site by uploading an HTML file to your webserver’s root directory.
3. Create an XML file listing all pages and adding relevant info about them like update frequency.
4. Upload the sitemap.xml to your webserver
5. Let Google know where you’ve uploaded it

Voila! In addition to keeping track of Googlebot’s spidering your web pages, you also get statistics that are useful if you plan to improve your Google rankings. For example, if you find out you’re all of a sudden N1 for Mentos + Coke videos, you can build on that success.

Note: If you’re using Wordpress to power your blog, there’s a plugin that will create your sitemap automatically. It will also update it every time you post. Nifty!

Note: SEO is best outsourced to professionals who follow the search engines closely. According to some black hat SEOs, the sitemaps might even hurt your rankings in the long run because Google will know more about you. You shouldn’t worry about it if you are a regular (legal) site though.