Optimism is up in China as the Lunar Year of the Tiger is expected to bring economic rebound that will stimulate increased IT spending.

According to a new report of Springboard Research titled “China Key IT Trends 2010,” the IT industry in China is expected to follow the recovery of the Chinese economy. Springboard described China’s IT industry as “resilient and steadily recovering” with IT spending this year expected to grow 11.6 per cent year-on-year.

Previously postponed projects are expected to continue this year though Springboard also noted that companies are aware of the risks involved.

“The economic crisis drastically matured IT consumption in China. Although the enterprises are open to emerging technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing to cut costs and improve efficiencies, they are still very cautious with launching new IT projects,” said Bryan Wang, country manager, Greater China, at Springboard.

2010 growth

Springboard expressed confidence in its forecast for the IT market in China for 2010 as its forecast for last year of 11 per cent was on target with the actual growth of 11.3 per cent.

The research firm’s outlook is based on interviews with 100 CIOs, IT and business managers from various industries in China.

The Top 10 IT trends expected for enterprises this year are:

1. Corporate IT spending will moderately rebound, fuelled by new and refreshed project investment. IT spending is expected to increase by a modest five per cent, said Springboard. Seventy-five per cent of the 86 respondents in the survey said their corporate IT budgets will increase this year.

2. Cost-cutting and efficiency improvement for infrastructure maintenance will remain the top IT challenges for enterprises. Survey respondents said their top chief concern this year would be cutting down on the cost of maintaining IT systems while improving efficiencies.

3. The importance of information security gains traction in the corporate IT environment. Information security is another major concern among respondents with 34 per cent of respondents saying they plan to implement security solutions.

4. Virtualisation will continue gaining momentum, and is expected to play a more critical role as 41 per cent of respondents said “data centre integration and virtualisation” are the key technologies that will impact their business this year.

5. “Cloud computing” was the IT buzzword last year and it is expected to gain momentum “dramatically” this year with the government as the key driver behind public cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) projects.

6. The China enterprise resource planning (ERP) market will undergo accelerated consolidation this year after the slowdown last year. International vendors are expected to go after the small and medium-sized businesses while local vendors are eyeing the profitable high-end business.

7. A wave of innovative new payment technologies, such as cashless payment and mobile payment, will emerge as indicated by the rise of 3G users last year.

8. Government efforts to converge three-way networks (broadcasting, telecom, and Internet) offer potential for IPTV and other innovative applications, but with slow movement.

9. Microblogging, the new social networking buzzword in China, will lead the growth of social networking, fuelled by the popularisation of mobile Internet; and

10. After the slowdown in 2009, software outsourcing will recover, particularly in the second half of the year with annual growth rate expected to hit over 25 per cent, up from 14 per cent in 2009.

Springboard said these forthcoming trends indicate that IT users are becoming mature in their IT spending. It also noted that China is moving from being a manufacturing base into an IT service centre.

“China is catching up with India in offshore outsourcing. With strong government support and a large IT talent pool, we believe China’s role as a regional outsourcing centre will grow,” the report concluded.

Source:http://www.mis-asia.com/news/articles/it-spending-in-china-set-for-rebound-in-2010-springboard

An estimated 19 school custodians would be laid off as part of a plan to outsource the night shift to a private company.

Officials say the plan which will be reviewed at a school board meeting Wednesday night would save the district at least $700,000 in salaries and benefits, helping to offset the loss of $1.3 million in state aid.

But the workers say the jobs should remain in the community. The layoffs would decimate the staff of 30 full-time employees, said James Milligan, president of the Leonia Schools Service Association.

Milligan said he was notified about the proposal last week and is aiming to pack the school board meeting with opponents of the plan.

“A lot of the parents in town know the service we provide … we’ve been here for years, we know these kids, and we look after them when no one else is in the building after school,” he said.

“You bring an outside company in they’re not going to look after the kids.”

But Schools Superintendent Bernard Josefsberg said the district was hit hard by the cut in state aid and had “little choice but to look to reduce payroll.” At $2.7 million, state aid for next year falls below the level the district received in 2001.

If the custodians were to remain with their existing salaries and benefits, taxpayers would see an 8.4 percent increase in the local levy, Josefsberg said.

“Other districts are effectively dismantling programs.The instrumental program is on the chopping block in Ridgewood.In Leonia, our central system is still in place,” he said.

Milligan said the district refused to negotiate with the union, and that the maintenance workers are currently among the lowest paid in the state.

“Most of us are already working two jobs to make ends meet, and if we get laid off, we’ll probably have to go on food stamps,” he said.

Josefsberg said nothing is finalized, and that negotiations are not off the table.

“We will give them the information, reach out to them and let them come back to us, so if they can make that happen, there’s no argument,” Josefsberg said.

“The reality is that the private companies charge less, and we need to save where we can.”

A similar proposal to outsource custodial and cafeteria staff was tabled in Saddle Brook in February, after a string of opponents spoke out against the plan.

Source:http://www.northjersey.com/news/education/89489612_Leonia_trustees_weigh_cutting_19_custodians.html

Crowdsourcing: “a neologistic compound of Crowd and Outsourcing for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an ‘open call’ to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.”

The concept of crowdsourcing has attracted a lot of press but over the last few months its visibility seems to have waned slightly. It looks like two factors involved. The first is there’s not been much in the way of “hot” news about crowdsourcing while the second is that for all but simple problems most crowdsourcing attempts can be disappointing.

Crowdsourcing takes center stage at DEMOfall ‘09

While defining the work to be done has been a major issue with what I’ll call crowdsourcing 1.0 the bigger problem has been over the quality of the results.

Consider Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). There are really only two controls that you have over quality. One of these is that you can require that workers have an “approval rate” equal or greater than some value (approval rate is the percentage or work units that have not been rejected). This is problematic because approval rate isn’t necessarily accurate as those assigning the work may not bother to give feedback on problematic responses.

The other control is to have multiple workers assigned to the same work unit then have their results automatically cross-compared to detect conflicting answers. The problem here is that the comparison can only be done for relatively simple cases and many types of response aren’t amenable to string or numeric value comparisons.

In what CloudCrowd describes as crowdsourcing 2.0, the company uses a crowd of vetted workers who are given a credibility rating not only on the basis of customer response to their output but also through assessment by CrowdCloud employees and peer review by other workers.

What CloudCrowd brings to the business is consultation to determine and define the problem to be solved and then management of the project execution. The big gain here is that the customer no longer has to wrestle with defining their own problem in terms of a system that essentially pre-packages solutions and consequently can achieve a faster turnaround time because experts implement and manage the workflow.

Think of this not as workload outsourcing but business process outsourcing. For example, a copy editing process with CloudCrowd can result in as much as a 90% reduction in turnaround time.

CloudCrowd charges a setup fee to establish the problem and define the solution and pricing is based on the required level of worker skill and scale of the problem.

CloudCrowd workers, who currently number over 20,000 worldwide and interface with the company via a Facebook application, are paid according to their specific skills and the difficulty of the problem thus identifying image porn might be priced at $0.02 per work unit, writing a short script to generate and advertising video might be worth $5. This equates to hourly rates from $3 or $4 per hour to start with up to $10 or more for more skilled workers.

Source:http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/web/2010/032910web1.html