Articles by Anthony Mitchell

Police in Bangalore, India, reported the arrest Tuesday night of the chief suspect in the theft of funds from a score of customers of HSBC bank in the UK. Nadeem Kashmiri is being charged in India with stealing customer data that was sent to Nadeem's accomplices in the UK. Nadeem's accomplices assisted him in withdrawing funds from customers' HSBC bank accounts between March and May of this year...

The loss of personal data on an estimated 26.5 million U.S. military veterans, up to 2.2 million current service members and an unquantified number of spouses continues to generate public controversy. It also provides lessons for how the private sector could prevent and respond to the loss of personal information The data loss originated from a Ve...

Apple Computer announced internally on May 29 that it is pulling back from plans to establish a customer support facility in Bangalore, India. The news regarding Apple's Indian subsidiary Apple Services India was released publicly on Saturday Apple has not announced plans to downscale its outsourcing operations in India or its marketing and distri...

Acquisition agreements are the most important legally binding documents in the acquisition process, but their role is frequently misunderstood. They structure the deal and allocate liabilities and responsibilities among buyers and sellers The commercial terms of an acquisition agreement are usually developed out of those anticipated in a non-bindi...

Buying a U.S. company offers a quick and easy way to acquire a client base without having to build one up slowly through traditional sales and marketing efforts, efforts that can be expensive, time consuming and not always successful. As described in part one of this series, acquisitions can provide U.S.-based expertise and infrastructure that can be used to re-invent and re-energize a business by shifting some portion of its production and service operations to more competitive locations...

U.S. companies that have not globalized their production or service operations are prime acquisition candidates for Western and overseas investors. Following an acquisition, the new owners can gradually shift some or all of an acquired firm's work offshore to competitive locations, making the entire business more profitable and competitive The suc...

Acquisition of existing enterprises offers the quickest, safest route to entering new markets and expanding rapidly within existing markets. The alternative route is organic growth through traditional sales and marketing efforts We begin here by recognizing the limits of conventional sales and marketing campaigns, then shift to discussing minimum ...

The trend of Americans and Canadians buying call centers in India is driven by the low cost of these facilities and by the speed with which buyers can begin using them. Thefirst article in this series in this series focuses on the advantages of buying a facility with less than 100 seats in Bangalore, primarily for outbound voice work In Part 2, w...

Indian call centers are being purchased by U.S. and Canadian companies seeking to quickly gain access to call center services offshore, particularly outbound services. Although media attention focuses more on the sale of U.S. assets to Asian and Middle Eastern firms, this trend in the other direction highlights how globalization is linking economies, consumers and businesses around the world...

On the eve of President Bush's first visit to India, people in both countries are re-examining U.S.-India relations, with special attention being paid to economic relations. An account of outstanding issues in U.S.-India economic relations and India's moves to institute economic reforms can be provided through the record of one man. In this context, we can identify opportunities for improving U.S. ties with the world's largest democracy...

Who are customer relations managers and how do they perform their roles? For answers, we look to IT and call center outsourcing. The roles of customer relations managers have been made more complex by both globalization and the virtualization of organizations, as described in Part 1 of this series Clients initially encounter customer relations ...

Leet has outgrown its roots as an obscure communication system for computer bulletin board users and has become a broad cultural phenomenon. It is expressed by acronyms and synonyms, and by substituting letters with numbers, punctuation marks, and phonetic combinations. In leet, leet itself can be expressed as l33t or 1337. The full formal long form is elite or 31337...

Customer relations managers are the key point of contact between clients and service providers in the outsourcing process. Their role is being transformed by the telecommunications revolution and the globalization of customer service work, as detailed earlier in these pages In the offshore outsourcing field, client relations managers are often fo...

No type of management position has undergone more profound changes over the last ten years than that of client relations managers. Changes are being driven by economic globalization, competitive pressures and the information technology (IT) revolution. Changes in the roles of client relations managers parallel changes in the importance of these positions, particularly in business-to-business environments...

On Saturday night, Sept. 24, an undersea cable connecting Karachi, Pakistan, and Mumbai, India, to the West failed around 10:27 p.m. local time in Pakistan. The cable fault blocked 75 percent of Pakistan's Internet connectivity to the outside world and some voice traffic as well Service was restored at 1:25 a.m. the next day, but has left the high ...

Do you plan to conduct business abroad? If yes, then you need to know how you may be seen by others. Otherwise failure can result. The globalization of supply chains and support services means that you don't need to travel to engage in business internationally, but that lack of face-to-face interaction only makes communication that much more critical...

How big of a problem is spam? The 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey estimated that spam costs the United States economy US$21.58 billion per year in lost productivity That estimate is based on the assumption that United States Internet users spend an average of three minutes sorting through and deleting spam every day they go online. It doe...

Ah, e-mail, the lifeblood for millions of businesses across the globe. What would we do without it? In last week's article, I discussed What to Do If Your E-Mail Is Blocked. Just as there are precautions that you can take to retain access to e-mail privileges, there are methods which you can use to regain e-mail access....

Without access to e-mail, many of us would cease to function. If you use e-mail regularly, there is a 100 percent chance that some of the e-mails you send or receive will be blocked. If such e-mails are not important to you, then you might not notice. However, if those e-mails are important, then inconvenience or anguish might result There are prec...

American relations with China may be seen from both a political perspective and in regard to how U.S. firms are seeking to enter the Chinese market. We begin here with the political perspective and then examine strategies for U.S. firms seeking to enter Chinese markets It can be hard for many people outside the U.S. to understand U.S. foreign and e...