Pragmatic Outsourcing

’08 – the Year of Predictions

End of year is usually also the busiest time of the year… unless it’s 2008. Moving deals across the finish line, inking contracts, pushing code into production to meet contractual obligations and milestones, writing employee performance reviews … there are fewer of those this year. Well, many of us are still extremely busy, it’s what we are busy with is a bit different. Some update their resumes, some dive head first into networking, some pull out dusty crystal balls to become fortunetellers. I would say this year could be called the year of predictions, at least it feels like everyone either making those or looking for them, even though we all know the value of predictions we just can’t yield the temptation. And it’s no surprise that when I am looking in my immediate neighborhood in the blogosphere I see some great posts in one or another way linked to predictions:

Phil Fersht offers an interesting high level forecast of trends in his Horses outsourcing predictions for 2009 with some interesting thoughts with very clear messages – Survival of the fittest. Let’s not beat around the bush here… we’re in for a very tough economy, budgets are being cut across the board and companies won’t be increasing their spending on IT and business operations.

James Wheeler in his The Dao of Outsourcing tells about how Chinese software services revenue predictions fall short.  Here is just one of his observations – ‘02 Gartner prediction of the software services revenues for 2006 from China with 0.6 probability – $27.1 billion, reality – $12 billion…

Dean Stevens does something completely unusual – ranking his last year predictions. He got 46 out of 100 which he is not impressed with “Not so good, hunh? I both underestimated the severity of the global slowdown, and overestimated the progress that Chinese vendors would make this year. Sigh…” Well, as far as I am concerned that’s amazing considering the rollercoaster we’ve seen.

Jamie Liddell offers a great sentiment on value of predictions in his The Perils of Prognostication “Who could have foreseen only a year ago that by the turn of 2009 we would be living in a world where the US president-elect was an African-American with the middle name “Hussein”; where several western governments – including that bastion of economic liberalism, the United States – had effectively nationalised major financial institutions; where oil prices would stand at the end of the year at effectively one-third of what they were halfway through it; and where Oprah had finally turned her back on dieting for good?”

Well, whether it’s a right thing to do or not I guess I will jump on the bandwagon of predictions and do my best as well, in a separate post though.   And I will be happy if I can get close to 50% by the end of ’09.

December 17, 2008 Posted by Nick Krym | News, Articles, Thoughts and Comments | 1 Comment