Worldwide Campus

Once upon a time, companies boasted of having offices in
Manhattan, Munich, Madrid, Mumbai, and Manila. Each office managed its set of
customers and suppliers, with a lot of 'good advice' coming in from the head
office. There was precious little governance or standardization. Paradoxically,
the use of third-party service providers has catalyzed better governance and
standards in captive or shared-services centers scattered in distant parts of
the world.

There are multiple ways to implement the concept of a
worldwide campus. Regardless of the company having globally dispersed teams
working on disparate pieces of work, what binds these offices together is a
defined, common architecture and a shared-enterprise objective.

Boston-based Fidelity, the world's largest mutual-fund
company, for example, has subsidiary offices in most countries, which service
local markets; has captive centers in India to service its global operations;
has outsourced to almost half a dozen third-party IT service providers and
itself functions as a human resources and benefits administration provider to
companies such as General Motors and Novartis.

Fidelity is one of the many hundreds of multinational
companies that have such complex setups. With services on their way to becoming
commoditized (See Driving Down Prices, Global Services, April 2006), the global
playing field is no longer open only to companies with deep pockets.
Increasingly, smaller companies are also acquiring capabilities offshore,
largely through outsourcing relationships, including managed services. In the
area of product development, for instance, it is not uncommon to find tech
startups developing their software products in Bangalore. So much so, that a
significant number of venture capitalists demand that startups build an offshore
angle to their business plans.

Such complexity in operations is nothing new; it has been
happening in other industries for decades. In manufacturing, for instance,
components may get produced in China and Taiwan, assembled in Malaysia and
packaged in and shipped from China. All these activities may be coordinated from
the US.

“The services industry, and BPO in general, is just
starting to catch up with its manufacturing brethren,” says Brian Maloney,
recently appointed as President of the newly formed Unisys Global Industries.
Maloney has been CEO of AT&T Solutions and COO of Perot Systems.

Making the Right Connections

Of course, placing the right tech investments is the lifeblood of the
ever-growing worldwide campuses. There is no denying that it is the enormous
amount of fiber-optic cables-the fat bandwidth pipes-spread under the oceans
and telecom connections that form the backbone on which global operations rest.
But, how technology is deployed across various locations and what it means for
different users-parent company, subsidiaries and provider
companies-determines the flow of information in this complex network.

Multinational companies typically possess a complex, routed
network with thousands of devices and end points. Network-management centers,
distributed across multiple continents, will have diagnostic and repair
capabilities.

“During the day when the United States is open business>, we might have done most of the network management in the US,” says
Maloney, explaining the industry's follow-the-sun approach that is now quite
the norm. “During the rest of the clock, we might do it from Asia and
Europe.”

A tangle of distributed, decentralized and multishore
operations requires CIOs to develop a global vision. They need to be able to
think about managing data, networks, users and security issues at the local
level and then integrating them with the global network. They have to think
through questions that may seem straightforward in the context of a local or
regional office, yet become complex solutions in the context of a worldwide
campus. While larger companies may be more familiar with these issues, it's
the first-timers that need to grapple with them. Here are some questions to
consider:

Where does the data reside? The nucleus of this worldwide
campus -both in terms of technology and business decisions-remains in the
head office of the parent country. All the applications and data reside in the
parent country - the US in the case of most American companies-or may be
spread across a few regions of the world. These data centers have very rigorous
backup and coordination capabilities.

Why is data concentrated in one place? Moving the
applications and data to local offices is a costly and complicated endeavor,
requiring each office to replicate the infrastructure around the data
-security, redundancy, fail-over, backup and policy. In the context of
outsourcing, this will completely negate the cost-arbitrage advantage.

“If you move applications , the cost of
outsourcing will drastically jump. You will need to plan for fail over of data
centers and application redundancy between the locations, which will get
costly,” explains Vikrant Varshney, India Representative, the Business
Continuity Institute, UK.

How is data accessed? Connectivity is determined by the
amount of data to be transferred and the speed at which it has to be
transferred. These will be used for voice over IP (VoIP), e-mail (companies
prefer collaborative systems such as Lotus Notes), official chat clients (not
AOL or Yahoo), video and tele-conferencing.

“Every location, almost every building of ours is
equipped with VoIP and video conferencing. We also have our own portal-based Web
conferencing where we can invite a third party or a partner we are working with
to participate,” explains Padmaja Krishnan, director, communications
infrastructure, Computer Sciences Corporation. CSC serves as a good example of a
worldwide campus-it employs 80,000 people, is present in 92 countries and
conducts business in 34 languages.

Who has access to what data? Users in other locations can
access the data located centrally depending on their rights of access-users in
a captive setup may have different access rights to those in a third-party
setup, while the project-management team may have an entirely different set of
access rights. Even within the captive setup, for instance, the management team
may have access to accounting and HR-related information, while the team lead
may have access to information related only to the applications-development
project that he is working on.

“Whether you are five, 50 or 5,000 people, access rules
remain the same,” says Varshney. “And that's where it is easy if you have
a thin client environment.”

Companies follow one of two means to give access rights:
One involves restricting access of everyone by default, and then selectively
giving access to some users; the other involves making the system accessible to
all by default, and then configuring it to deny access to some users. The first
approach is a more secure one.

How is the network secured? Remote security and monitoring
is paramount, and companies usually follow some typical measures such as
permissions-based access, passwords, firewalls, intrusion-detections systems,
virtual-private networks,  thin
clients, encryption, digital certificates and, increasingly, biometric
technology.

Some companies, and often governments, dealing with
sensitive data do not give external users the right to access their data
centers. Instead they get the service provider to position some of its people
within their premises.

By Juhi Bhambal
in New Delhi, India

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in

Republished with permission from Global Services

(www.globalservicesmedia.com)