Friday, February 11, 2011

“Who is your AKPO partner? Do they do your BIM too?”

...asked me someone recently. You’ll be pleased to know, I managed to look mildly intelligent and not say “What?”. ... for days afterwards, I kept musing over the sad fact, that I ended up in a field, where one blinks and a whole new ‘delivery strategy’ emerges.
Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is outsourcing, where knowledge-related work is carried out by workers in a different company (and often country) to save cost.

Well, it is unfortunate that I never really bought into the FlatCAD type (I guess, not-knowledge based) outsourcing. For me, it was:
“The market is changing. We are no longer able to stay competitive and provide zillions of useless drawings at a price that clients wanting buildings are prepared to pay;
So, we’ll go to India (Hong Kong, China...) and we’ll buy twice as many drawings for half as much price and the clients will care even less about the building they initially set out to get...”

Hmmmm... If you ask me, no one was a winner. Not in the long term.
Otherwise, BIM would not have needed to happen at all!
See, I believe that BIM emerged, albeit reluctantly and unconvincingly BECAUSE the FlatCAD concept – outsourced or not, was no longer viable.
Outsourcing and BIM? Forget it, if it is possible (and in fact it is) it will not be the AKPO type!


1 comment:

  1. Hello! I like your blog a lot :) There is a great chance that BIM will help in long distance project elaboration. As a matter of fact, that is already happening. KPO? Hmm, it really depends on the type of work, can it be streamlined and to what extent. I witnessed a team from Philippines designing private housing projects for Australia market...looks like cookie cutter system, but works..

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