IT Outsourcing in Ukraine: Opinions, Prospects, Trends

IT Outsourcing Review: Ukraine's team continues posting Guest posts from our readers and contributors. This week's post is devoted to the prospects, current state as well as trends in the local IT outsourcing industry.

Development, in general, will focus more keenly on usability as organizations implement digitization plans. There’ll be a lot of work around smart mobile apps to empower users through ready access to information. Customer experience has emerged as the No. 1 priority for businesses at the moment and will be a guiding principle for much of the programming that takes place. Customer experience is not just for the end user, also for the company who choose to outsource.

Business owners know that the customer should come first in everything. However, many have ignored this fact in software development. In the past, most businesses focused on functional apps that incorporate the latest technology. Budgets and achieving business goals were the main considerations when developing new technologies. Customers had to learn to use new programs or go back to the conventional means of communication. Today, business owners are focusing on giving their customer the best experience when using their apps. We are likely to witness more and more apps with attractive user interfaces. The high competition in online and social media marketing is shifting focus to the needs of end users.

Outsourcing today is a rapidly growing business around the world, especially in Ukraine. Outsourcing companies in Ukraine are in general giving a high service to their clients, but clients are changing and become more focus on quality and value for the money spent.

I think clients in the near future will only pay for the quality they get. Imagine a development project and put it into Scrum. The project has difference sprints. Each Sprint ends up with a quality check. If the quality is ok then the client will pay. Each sprint has prices that are agreed with the client. Now it's up to the development company to deliver the quality they have promised to the client. The client doesn't care how many hours you have used on each sprint.

Some trends that will grow in 2018:

Licensing:

Most businesses outsource software development to third parties for various reasons. Sometimes the internal developers do not have the skills and knowledge required to create the latest software. For some businesses, outsourcing is a way of saving costs and time. The licensing agreement between developers and the licensee are sometimes violated, leaving the license in a dilemma. If the developer goes out of business, the licensee may have no way of accessing the software. Licensing cost for most companies are also getting higher and higher and in the end of the day, they will pay the same in the license as they would have paid to get own software developer and save money in the future since it's cheaper in many cases to maintain your own developed software than buying licenses.

Security:

Outdated security makes critical infrastructure and industry vulnerable. In the coming years, we expect to see cyber attacks targeted infrastructure that will spread further into the industrial part of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Although we do not yet know all the details, the last cyber attack is a good example of the vulnerability of our infrastructure that can affect many citizens at once. This is because a large part of the world's infrastructure such as nuclear power plants, power grids, telecommunications and industrial production is built on old software before the threats of cyber attacks occurred. These systems often run on legacy technology, where security patches are either unavailable or not used at all.This has become a major problem as large parts of our infrastructure and industry's production systems now have access to the Internet that potentially can allow hackers outside the enterprise.

The increasing fusion of information technology and operational technology increases this vulnerability and, in particular, threatens SCADA's operational technology. As an industry, critical infrastructure and manufacturing companies need to expand both security systems, physical security controls and implement solutions that prevent threats across both information and operational technology. Security will grow very fast even faster than we have ever seen today.

About Author

Henrik Pedersen

Henrik Pedersen is co-founder/chairman of DU-Consult. Besides that Mr. Pedersen is a member of Danish Business Association in Ukraine (BDA) and Committee chairman of Lviv International Rotary Club. Rotary is an international charity organization with over 1.2 million members worldwide.

More info about Henrik Pedersen here

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