I was very privileged to get the opportunity to moderate a panel at SXSW in Austin last week.  Our topic was Outsourcing 2.0 - Is the World Flat or Not?

My fellow panelists were Andrea Azril from Star Tech Global, Sandeep Sood from Monsoon Company and Matt Tritico, a developer in New Orleans working for LSU.

We had a very lively discussion about working with overseas teams, focused on the trade-offs and lessons learned through the work we’ve done.  Frankly, we expected a more politically focused discussion with the world economic crisis and job losses in the US.  However, the audience was a very sophisticated audience, much more focused on learning the in’s and out’s of outsourcing than scoring political points.  As I’ve mentioned to people I’ve discussed the political sensitivity of outsourcing with, in other parts of the world they don’t call it outsourcing, they call it competing.

The video from our talk is below.  I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Special thanks to Andrea, Sandeep & Matt for making it such a great panel and the Net2NO crew for all their support.

Will and I attended a core conversation panel at SXSW called Outsourcing 2.0 led by Sandeep Sood of Monsoon Co. It was a very interesting discussion, and Sandeep worked through a number of topics that are important in the next generation of outsourcing.

We discussed with Sandeep the pros and cons of building a personal connection between an overseas team and client. I offered up that it is important to Flatsourcing that our team in Russia is as connected as possible to cutting edge movements and technologies in Silicon Valley and across the globe. We must understand the environment that are clients operate in to fully understand their strategic direction. For this reason, even if technologies like Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook haven’t penetrated Russia yet, it is still important for our team to be active with and understand them.

Furthermore, we position our approach as “replicating hiring an an employee in your office as closely as possible.” We believe this is important because often the roadblocks to successful outsourcing are not technical, they are the fundamental barriers to human relationships: trust, respect and communication. We have found that building a “virtual bond” between our team and our clients via social technologies like Twitter, Facebook, instant messenger and blogging facilitates an understanding of each other and builds the relationship, just as social interaction amongst a team in an office does.

Sandeep felt that keeping business and personal interactions separate is important, and doesn’t encourage his team in India to connect with clients this way. We agreed that this may be more of a reflection of the more corporate environment of his client base than a fundamental difference in the importance of connection between virtual teams. Both approaches are clearly successful as Monsoon has a wonderful client base. We really enjoyed spending time with Sandeep.

One of the core values of our company is building a working environment with our clients based on trust, respect, open communication, and understanding. My strong belief is that one of the fundamental breakdowns in outsourcing 1.0 was the inate distrust that is built into the relationship structure. Of all the bad experiences that I hear about with outsourcing, they often start with eLance or oDesk. In my mind, trust and respect go further than technology can in ensuring a successful working partnership. The oDesk approach monitors a contractor like big brother, which imbues the relationship with a feeling of distrust right off the bat. I haven’t seen a time clock in a internet company ever where employees are required to clock in an out every time they sit down. When a contractor is involved, why do these systems become necessary?

We are thrilled about the recent addition of 4 new clients to Flatsourcing. Each of these clients has a different need that we are meeting. We are doing our best to build a trusting and personal relationship with each of them, and its working great. After all, the closer we are (even thousands of miles away), the more successful we can be together.