Group items tagged

Cost savings — The lowering of the overall cost of the service to the business. This will involve reducing the scope, defining quality levels, re-pricing, re-negotiation, and cost re-structuring. Access to lower cost economies through offshoring called "labor arbitrage" generated by the wage gap between industrialized and developing nations.[10] Focus on Core Business — Resources (for example investment, people, infrastructure) are focused on developing the core business. For example often organizations outsource their IT support to specialised IT services companies. Cost restructuring — Operating leverage is a measure that compares fixed costs to variable costs. Outsourcing changes the balance of this ratio by offering a move from fixed to variable cost and also by making variable costs more predictable. Improve quality — Achieve a steep change in quality through contracting out the service with a new service level agreement. Knowledge — Access to intellectual property and wider experience and knowledge.[11] Contract — Services will be provided to a legally binding contract with financial penalties and legal redress. This is not the case with internal services.[12] Operational expertise — Access to operational best practice that would be too difficult or time consuming to develop in-house. Access to talent — Access to a larger talent pool and a sustainable source of skills, in particular in science and engineering.[13][14] Capacity management — An improved method of capacity management of services and technology where the risk in providing the excess capacity is borne by the supplier. Catalyst for change — An organization can use an outsourcing agreement as a catalyst for major step change that can not be achieved alone. The outsourcer becomes a Change agent in the process. Enhance capacity for innovation — Companies increasingly use external knowledge service providers to supplement limited in-house capacity for product innovation.[14][15] Reduce time to market — The acceleration of the development or production of a product through the additional capability brought by the supplier.[16] Commodification — The trend of standardizing business processes, IT Services, and application services which enable to buy at the right price, allows businesses access to services which were only available to large corporations. Risk management — An approach to risk management for some types of risks is to partner with an outsourcer who is better able to provide the mitigation.[17] Venture Capital — Some countries match government funds venture capital with private venture capital for start-ups that start businesses in their country.[18] Tax Benefit — Countries offer tax incentives to move manufacturing operations to counter high corporate taxes within another country. Scalability — The outsourced company will usually be prepared to manage a temporary or permanent increase or decrease in production. Creating leisure time — Individuals may wish to outsource their work in order to optimise their work-leisure balance.[19] Liability — Organizations choose to transfer liabilities inherent to specific business processes or services that are outside of their core competencies. [edit] Implications

Some effects of globalization: The United States is the center of globalization trends – we drive most of the world’s economy, influence international policy, and financial transactions. The prime paradigm is capitalism – a faithful reliance on the market to drive decisions. Global forces like the World Bank promote decentralization and privatization.  Governments get out of the way, leave services to private groups. Inherent in capitalism is an unequal distribution of wealth. Having wealth generates more wealth, having no resources leaves countries at a severe disadvantage. Technology is one kind of resource and wealth. Countries that have technology, use it to develop new products, markets, ideas… and financial power.

What are globalization effects on Education (in the U.S.) Heightened competition between nations to develop an educated labor force; nations need a competitive niche. Education is seen as a mechanical process – develop basic skills, technical skills, competitive skills. Movements like standards and testing develop from this view of education. The cultural philosophy of capitalism, decentralization, and privatization manifest in strategies such as independent schools, charter schools, and vouchers. Higher education (colleges and universities) are more closely tied to the private sector – it is a necessary reality. Technology is seen as a key area for education, but how is technology important? View 1 -People trained directly in the hard sciences and technology fields contribute to those lucrative markets. View 2 – Information technologies impact how people work, play, gain information, and participate in communities. Those who can use IT to further their own aims win out, those without access or skills lose out in the new world.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a 1999 book by Thomas L. Friedman that posits that the world is currently undergoing two struggles: the drive for prosperity and development, symbolized by the Lexus, and the desire to retain identity and traditions, symbolized by the olive tree. He says he came to this realization while eating a sushi box lunch on a Japanese bullet train after visiting a Lexus factory and reading an article about conflict in the Middle East. Friedman leads the reader on an international quest for a new understanding of the often misunderstood and misapplied term "globalization" by tapping on to stories of his actual experiences in interfacing with many of the global movers and shakers. He proposes that "globalization is not simply a trend or fad but is, rather, an international system. It is the system that has replaced the old Cold War system, and, like that Cold War System, globalization has its own rules and logic that today directly or indirectly influence the politics, environment, geopolitics and economics of virtually every country in the world."

In computing, a processor is the unit that reads and executes program instructions, which are fixed-length (typically 32 or 64 bit) or variable-length chunks of data. The data in the instruction tells the processor what to do. The instructions are very basic things like reading data from memory or sending data to the user display, but they are processed so rapidly that we experience the results as the smooth operation of a program. Processors were originally developed with only one core. The core is the part of the processor that actually performs the reading and executing of the instruction. Single-core processors can only process one instruction at a time. (To improve efficiency, processors commonly utilize pipelines internally, which allow several instructions to be processed together, however they are still consumed into the pipeline one at a time.) A multi-core processor is composed of two or more independent cores. One can describe it as an integrated circuit which has two or more individual processors (called cores in this sense).[1] Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die (known as a chip multiprocessor or CMP), or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. A many-core processor is one in which the number of cores is large enough that traditional multi-processor techniques are no longer efficient — this threshold is somewhere in the range of several tens of cores — and probably requires a network on chip.

come right to the main point of this review: Thomas Friedman's brilliant catch phase, book title and powerfully developed new thesis — "The World is Flat" — is yet another reaffirmation of what Bahá'u'lláh said about 150 years ago when He declared that “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” That's not to say there is nothing new in Mr. Friedman's latest book. The World Is Flat is a wide-ranging examination of how trends and technologies like freedom, the Internet, and open-source software are converging to make it possible for educated people everywhere to compete with the best and the brightest in North America and Europe . And that is changing everything, for people everywhere, much more quickly than had been previously imagined. Mr. Friedman, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the New York Times , says the convergence of these trends and technologies is “flattening” the world. They create a “level playing field” where companies and individuals now successfully compete in the global market regardless of location. Mr. Friedman is by now an acknowledged expert on globalization, having outlined its impact in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree . There he argued that globalization had become “the dominant international system at the end of the twentieth century — replacing the Cold War system…”