Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics 146
dcblogs writes "The Senate's immigration bill may force the large offshore outsourcing firms to reduce their use of H-1B visa-holding staff, forcing them to hire more local workers and raising their costs. But one large Indian firm, Infosys, will try to offset cost increases with software robotics. Infosys recently announced a partnership with IPsoft, a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services. With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine. Infosys says that IPsoft tools can 'reduce human intervention.' More colorfully, Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, told the Times of India, that 'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.' James Slaby, a research director of HFS Research who has been following the use of autonomics closely, wrote in a recent report that the IPsoft partnership may help Infosys 'reap fatter margins by augmenting and replacing expensive, human IT support engineers with cheaper, more accurate, efficient automated processes,' and by improving service delivery."
Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is why 90% of the time support for something is totally worthless.
Verizon wireless was rejecting some of the SMS we send our own employees. There is no one we could talk to who had any idea what to do. No customer facing person had any ability to tell us why they started doing this or if there was a process around it.
Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Interesting)
At least they tried to help. When one of my customers stopped getting push emails on her Blackberry, I was told by Rodgers Mobility support that push email is an unsupported feature and the policy was that she could not report delivery problems to anyone.
Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Interesting)
We had a similar issue with some provider not accepting our texts. It may have been Verizon. We had to ask one of our managers who used to work at Verizon to call a buddy of his who still worked there. Turned out that they have a different message size than other providers or something, and that if we sent something to the usual 160 character limit, it would not send at all. It was an edge case, but I am surprised it never came up before.
At this point, we need support companies that we pay that actually have employees who "know someone" inside the organization, because these big companies are about as transparent as muddy crude oil.
Verizon is a bit of a special case... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think that's bad, try getting help on a server issue when you're not a Verizon customer.
Back in 2006, I was working for a DoD contractor, and discovered that our order emails to suppliers were bouncing as spam if it went to a Verizon address. We tried for a solid week to call everyone we could possibly find at Verizon that could help, but either got stonewalled, referred to some useless person, or (most often) shoved into the standard customer tech support queue. Mostly we were treated like either a social-engineering attempt, an idiot, or something similar.
Thing is, my employer ran the EMALL website, which all armed forces used to order anything which wasn't an actual weapon. Our index was bigger than Amazon's
Finally, I gave up and spoke with the managers at DLA (Defense Logistics Agency), laying out the problem to date. We then put out a system-wide notice to all DoD suppliers that if they wanted to sell something to the military, they'd damned well better use something other than a Verizon email account. Two weeks later, Verizon came out of the blue, desperately calling us asking what they could do to help us out. Turns out they weren't fully RFC-compliant at the time; they fixed it pretty quickly once they realized that a lot of their DoD-supplier customers were suddenly asking them how much the contract ETFs came to.
Sad part is, if my employer was some tiny company in BFE, there would likely still be a problem with the damned thing.
Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Interesting)
I once had the displeasure of telling our client that the vendor (luckily not our company but our partner, so I could say "they" not "us") did not support the use of the "back" button in their web interface. Any support case that involved using it would be closed as not supported. For bonus points they didn't provide any functionality equivalent to it either, so of course everyone used the back button anyway where it did work. To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.
Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:3, Interesting)
You know who *used* to have a bad ass system? Sony.
You would call them up it would recognize your phone number (and what you have bought if you registered). It would ask you what you are calling about and route you to the correct repair center. If you had an open call it would route you to the same guy you were working with before and he would give you a status update. It was actually very cool to call them. No re-describing issues over and over no trying the same things over and over. *Then* they changed it out. You would then end up talking to 3 different guys who had no clue what was going on. It was rather sad.
Quality of Indian H1-Bs have fallen drastically. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most people who are still coming to USA fall in two categories. Some of them still love the freedom, opportunities and the general law and order and free markets etc. The other set is people who did not make the top cut in India, so trying to improve their chances by adding American experience to their resume.
Pretty soon all the goodwill earned by the top notch graduates from IITs, IISc and National Institutes of Technology, in the 1990s and early 2000s would have been totally spent. May be it has already happened. Now the fresh Indian H1-Bs are often seen as malingering, incompetent but with highly inflated ego. So even if the H1-B quota is raised to infinity, if the American corporations wise up, most of these visas will go unused. But Corporate America has to wake up first.