Intellectual Property Risks in outsourcing

Companies pose the risks of exposing data, confidential information, and mismanagement of technology and other IP assets during outsourcing their project development.

The Importance and ethics of intellectual property vary across industries and types of companies.  Software development outsourcing requires a great deal of sharing of knowledge between customers, organizations, and vendors. Therefore, the IP rights of stakeholders are included in one form or another. Thus intellectual property risk management and data protection issues have become increasingly vital for companies utilizing offshore outsourcing. 

Companies nowadays are more frequent in turning to third-party subject matter experts to outsource their most pressing business needs. It also lets them outsource critical processes that allow them to cut infrastructure costs, focus on the core abilities, and obtain new, enhanced technologies. Although these relationships present opportunities for businesses to enhance product and service quality and leverage economies of scale to compete better in their respective markets. They also come with the risks of exposing potential data and classified information and mismanagement of technology and other IP assets. 

Intellectual property protection remains one of the critical factors that direct outsourcing clients’ choices when conducting their businesses offshore. The risks involved with intellectual property ownership are further magnified in an outsourcing contract where the client’s IP is shared with its provider. The elevated risks associated with preserving the IP involve concrete and careful risk assessment plans by the outsourcing client. How can you make sure that your outsourcing providers don’t violate your IP rights? We’ll explain how to effectively transfer and protect your intellectual property to a software outsourcing company.

What are Intellectual Property Risks? 

The IP (Intellectual property) of a company may include data, software, business processes, inventions, trade secrets, employee details, and all the other forms of classified information. Intellectual property risks are the possible threats or vulnerabilities that a company or individual business needs to plan for when protecting their IP. These are some possible risks associated with keeping and transferring intellectual property to an outsourcing partner: 

• The legal costs related to defending an IP infringement case
• A decrease in revenue or share prices if the IP was proved to be invalid
• The damage and settlement costs that came  from the legal findings
• IP violations can cause a big impact on the trust between client and vendor.
• The costs when intellectual property loses its value or is no longer seen as an asset due to challenges, inconsistency, non-infringement to its ownership 
  

How to manage Intellectual Property Risks? 

Patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets or confidentiality agreements, your company’s intellectual property is just as, if not more valuable than your physical assets. When outsourcing software development, you may need excellent knowledge sharing between the software client and the vendor. As a result of this activity, it will include the protection of the stakeholder’s IP rights. It has been becoming more vital for businesses to implement robust data protection and IP management when employing offshore outsourcing. These are ways you can ensure the protection of your intellectual property while Outsourcing Software Development. Read More- Intellectual Property Risks in outsourcing

Project Management Best Practices For Offshore Software Development Model

Here are some of the project administration practices that a project manager should implement when managing offshore resources. 

Project management plays a crucial role in an organization’s overall progress. With the heightened competition in modern times, businesses expect project teams to work consistently and at a rapid pace. Only through the best project management practices, your performance can become better, faster, and more reliable. In project management, project managers have the role to plan, organize and manage resources to maximize the productivity and efficiency of the team.  The project management institute states that in addition to the applicable technical skills, a project manager needs to possess business management and leadership skills to ensure a project’s success.

In this gig economy, Most software companies today utilize offshore teams of developers to provide a more cost-effective option to clients looking for a solution to programming challenges. Offshore team management comes with its own set of challenges, but can also be worthwhile in ways that can enhance your life as a project manager.  We agree that managing a team of developers for an offshore software development project is not a walk in the park.  It’s even more difficult to manage a team from the other side of the world. In this article, we will try to lay out some of the project administration practices that a project manager should implement when managing offshore resources.

You may also read about the Key Project Management Methodologies

Know Your Team & Their Capabilities for offshore team management

Lack of face-to-face communication in teams remains a significant challenge when working with offshore teams. That is where research comes into the picture. 

Exercise due diligence: Stop slacking in important matters and do your due diligence. You need to find the best offshore software development outsourcing location for your business and weigh the pros and cons of each location. Weigh in to devise a comprehensible project scope and screen through quotes to set a realistic project budget.

Research the right vendor for the software development model: Connect strings with your preferred target location to scrutinize through recommendations and potential offshore team providers. Evaluate the technical capabilities of vendors through previous client feedback, portfolios, and case studies. 

Use outsourcing capabilities smartly: Get better at understanding the individual member’s skills when working with offshore teams and utilize them wisely to gain productivity in the work.  Defined project scope can additionally help you plan the availability of your team in advance and improve your project administration. Read More- Project Management Best Practices For Offshore Software Development Model

Get ahead of your competition with Machine Learning

Companies are integrating AI and Ml solutions to their business to stay ahead in the competition. Read the points mentioned to elucidate your thoughts on the subject.

There is a lot of uproar going on about the influential technologies that are dominating the business Intelligence market for almost every sector. Big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are being discovered and analyzed and with passing time people are coming with new applications for a better world and an improved future. While there are some who are still not aware of the potential and capabilities of Machine learning and the value it can add to their business. Machine learning draws insights from raw data and provides solutions to complex business problems based on analysis. Data processing in AI and ml algorithms help computers find hidden insights without any programming or human assistance. It is a technology of the future that ensures heightened efficiency, enhanced customer service relationship, and boosting sales for any business. With big companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft bringing in Cloud machine learning platforms, the credibility of artificial intelligence and machine learning just springs up.

There are now several applications of the insights that machine learning draws from raw data. These are used to solve complex business problems, increase efficiency, improve customer relationships, and hike up sales.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

The tech industry just like any other industry faces several challenges from time to time and recently one of them has been the capability for machines to analyze, manipulate, and understand human language. And NLP, a field of machine learning, helps with just that. It gives computers the ability to understand human language by building systems that are able to make sense of text so that they could translate, recommend text, and check grammar. However, certainly there are NLP equipped tools that are used to derive insights that can be used to automate tasks. Algorithms are used to build intelligent systems like voice activated personal assistants – siri, google assistant, alexa, and AI-powered chatbots that are capable of solving issues by translating the language when and where required for machines and humans.

Now when we come to the mechanism on how this works, we will first have to understand the two techniques that go into helping machines understand text. Syntactic analysis that assesses text using basic grammar rules to understand the structuring of sentences. Semantic analysis emphasises on understanding the meaning of the text, first the meaning of individual words and then the meaning when those words are combined. 

Business enterprises are getting better at understanding online conversations and how their customers perceive them and their products. They are also able to automate tedious tasks and make them more efficient. Language translation, sentiment analysis, text extraction, topic classification, and chatbots are some of the important applications of NLP known in the technical world. Read More- Get ahead of your competition with Machine Learning