Originally published in Computerworld. In the first 10 months of 2006, Chinese regulators uncovered 776 banking crimes, including 205 cases involving more than 1 million yuan ($125,000 U.S.). Fraud and other irregularities at Chinese banks added up to $95.9 billion in 2005, an increase of 31% from 2004, according to the China Banking Regulatory Commission. Read full article. … Read more »

Originally published in Computerworld. Four years ago, CEO John Cestar took a novel approach to increasing the skill levels at Freeborders, a small outsourcing provider that operates in China. He took a road trip around the U.S., looking for Chinese engineers working in U.S. companies who were interested in returning to China or would soon be compelled to do so because their work visas were about to expire. He recruited a pool of 20 people who spoke both Chinese and English and had U.S.-style management skills. Read full article. … Read more »

Originally published in Computerworld. About two years ago, Kevin Miller needed a little help supporting legacy applications and developing new software for large automotive manufacturers. He decided to conduct a Cobol pilot project with Information Technology United Corp., a Beijing-based outsourcer with U.S. offices in Redwood City, Calif. Read full article. … Read more »

Originally published in Computerworld. Hankscraft Inc. has been making industrial motors and mechanized pumps for more than 50 years in Reedsburg, Wis. The company came to China just three years ago but already has twice as many employees here as it has at home. Jonathan Funkhouser, who is general manager of Hankscraft’s China operations and who makes the top-level technology decisions, thought it was going to be hard to get all the government approvals he would need in order to set up shop in China. But that turned out to be the easy part. "Finding good employees and managers was the most difficult," he says. Read full article. … Read more »

Originally published in Computerworld. Among the various sourcing peculiarities and problems specific to China is regionalism, says Pieter Tsiknas, director of SearchBank’s Beijing office. Read full article. … Read more »

Originally published in Computerworld. In the West, companies want to put on a good face for customers, even if it means having to admit mistakes. Righting wrongs is a big part of a good public image, and a good internal image as well. In the East, particularly at traditional companies, saving face is important. Saving face means that you don’t admit your own mistakes and you don’t publicly humiliate co-workers by exposing their mistakes. Read full article. … Read more »

Compared with some of the big-league outsourcing players, Russia is a rookie. The country’s current revenue from IT outsourcing is $150 million to $200 million annually, a drop in the bucket compared with India’s yearly draw of $6 billion. But, though little more than a decade old, Russia’s outsourcing industry is learning to play to its strengths and is growing by 50% annually, analysts say. Those strengths include low-cost and highly trained workers. The annual salary for a programmer runs about $5,000 to $9,000, which is comparable to salaries in India. The World Bank estimates that Russia has the third-highest number of scientists and engineers per capita in the world. Read full article at Computerworld. … Read more »

As recently as a decade ago, the Russian banking sector was an antique monstrosity, a huge system of paper-based transactions inherited from the former Soviet Union. Businessmen in the fledgling capitalist economy were forced to carry suitcases of cash – typically American dollars – in order to make business deals. There wasn’t even a system of paper checks. People paid for utilities, bought groceries, paid rent and received their salaries in cash. However, within the past few years, and particularly since the 1998 collapse of the ruble, an avalanche of technological changes has swept through the Russian banking system. Read full article at Computerworld. … Read more »

When a broadcast tower fire threw several Moscow TV stations off the air last week, many would-be TV viewers turned to the Internet. In some cases, traffic to news sites doubled from usual levels. The sites reported few performance problems as a result, though one, Gazeta.ru, had to add a second server to handle the traffic, said Editor in Chief Vladislav Borodulin. Last Monday, 85,000 users visited the Gazeta.ru site. This was more than double the typical 40,000 daily average. But Borodulin said he wasn’t sure that the increase was because people couldn’t watch television or simply because they were hungry for news. Site visits had also spiked during the Kursk submarine crisis the previous week. Turning to the Web first for information about … Read more »

Larger financial institutions have an edge over small and nimble Internet upstarts in electronic customer relationship management (CRM), according to a new report released by Meridien Research in Newton, Mass. Larger institutions often have more experience with data analysis technologies and have already built data warehouses to track the huge amounts of customer data they’ve collected, said Anya Astafieva, a Meridien analyst who authored the report on the ability of banks to track the customers who use their Web sites. Read full article at Computerworld. … Read more »