Model Driven Offshoring

Offshoring – Promises and Challenges

There seems to be no going back – when looking at the development of the worldwide offshore outsourcing revenues, it becomes clear that offshoring is a reality today, and will play an even more important role in the future.

The benefits of Offshoring are compelling:

• Dramatic cost savings potential
  
  
• Improving a business's ability to focus on its core skills
  
  
• Scalability and flexibility of application resources and capacity
  
  
• Access to industry or process skills
  
  

Most industry experts today agree that companies must endorse these opportunities to stay competitive.

However, there are also many challenges – while there are few official numbers on failed offshore projects, it is clear that offshore development imposes a number of significant risks, including the failure to meet cost saving targets, customers complaints about quality issues, cultural and legal issues, and finally the risk of losing control over projects and project deliverables.

Model Driven Offshoring (MDO) is a novel approach to controlling the Offshore value chain more effectively, by combining the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach with offshore capabilities.

This web page provides an overview of MDO concepts, the MDO process and value proposition, and a concrete MDO case study.

Managing the Offshore Value Chain with MDO

An offshore strategy usually has to cope with three conflicting goals: cost reduction (implementation and maintenance cost), risk minimization (process control, control over deliverables, quality, compliance, etc), and maximization of flexibility (resource ramp-up / ramp-down, vendor independence). It is a key challenge for CIOs and offshore project managers to define a single strategy which allows to balance these three conflicting requirements to meet the specific needs of the own company.

MDO provides two key levers, which help creating an offshore strategy which meets the required cost/risk/flexibility profile. First, MDO allows for more flexible distribution of on-site and offshore development. Secondly, MDO combines low-cost ad-hoc development with highly automated MDA-based development. The combination of these two levers provides an unprecedented flexibility for defining an individual offshore strategy.


MDO Process

The MDO process is based on the two key levers provided by MDO. The process starts with a cost/ risk/ flexibility- profile based strategy definition, followed by an MDO-based project selection. Depending on the selected strategy and project, specific settings for the two MDO levers are defined, and an offshore service provider is selected.

MDO-specifics are included in the set-up of the project office. The individual settings of the two key MDO levers also control the actual project execution and maintenance.

MDO Value Proposition

A key challenge for companies today is to effectively balance the conflicting goals of offshoring: how to maximize cost savings and increase flexibility while at the other hand minimizing the risks? Naturally, the more work is sent offshore to reduce implementation and maintenance costs, the more one loses control over the process and the resulting work output, effectively increasing the risk. This is why controlling the amount of risk one is prepared to take in offshoring is mandatory to any successful offshore strategy.

MDO is very well suited to help mitigating these risks. Click here to read more.

MDO Case Study

DaimlerChrysler Technical Sales Support (TSS) has adopted MDO to gain better control over a large offshore development project.


Wolfgang Käfer, TSS Technology Lead:
The Model Driven Offshoring approach has a number of benefits, including improved cooperation and simplified coordination, increased transparency, dramatically improved quality, and on the long term control over intellectual property and investment security.

Click here to find out more about how DaimlerChrysler TSS is applying MDO in practice.

Please contact us at mdo@interactive-objects.com should you have further questions regarding MDO.