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Summary

An Italian SME, belonging to an international consulting group, specializing in IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, Software Integration and Agile Software Development, has developed methodologies and tools able to support companies in co-sourcing IT projects. The SME would like to find companies (1) interested in services to optimize the setup of their cosourcing project to take advantage of agile methodologies and modern architectures and/or (2) looking for an IT co-sourcer provider.

Full description

Cosourcing is a set of business and technology best practices, and supporting technologies, that can be used to increase the efficiency and lower the costs of the development of software applications. Best practices include specific architectural, organizational, and methodology solutions to the frequent problem of having to farm-out to separate organizations specific parts of projects. This includes a specific way to organize the work in work-packages (WP) and to assign each WP development either to the internal IT department or to an external IT provider. Supporting technologies provide specific and advanced technology solution to make the management of the various parts of the cosourcing more efficient, more transparent, more traceable.
Compared to traditional outsourcing, the cosourcing approach reduces the company IT development costs, while maintaining internally the whole control of the software application development lifecycle and well managing his IT application portfolio. To this aim, the practice needs well defined cosourcing processes definition and powerful supporting tools.
Thanks to a two-year R&D PIA innovation program co-funded by EU, Italian Ministry of Education, University and Scientific Research, and Regional Government of Calabria and in collaboration with the Informatics Department of an Italian University, the SME has addressed these topics. In particular the SME has significantly improved its ability to support companies in cosourcing development of their software projects, and to extend its capability by reaching a new generation of cosourcing skills. The SME has improved its comprehensive approach to software development, by introducing and integrating an explicit set of cosourcing practices. In addition, it has improved its consolidated Software Factory allowing SOA application development over the main software platforms, with capabilities supporting the whole cosourcing lifecycle, by means of tools and new specific applications that cover among others the project quote request for an external provider, the project development lifecycle, and the provider billing operations. These processes are supported by a web portal application that has been developed as part of this project. The most important business processes have been modeled by means of easy to customize workflows, allowing a customer to have the whole control of its cosourcing process.
The cosourcing portal is based on a federated repository where a user can easily insert and find every project asset, metadata (as features, design, interoperability), artifacts, deliverables, managerial documents (as quote, contract, bill, project plan).
The cosourcing portal is based and integrates tools such as: issue tracking system, wiki and knowledge-management system (KMS), a source code management system, a single sign-on system, asset repository, continuos integration system and orchestration tools.
The SME Software Factory includes the cosourcing portal and adds and specializes on component based software development where business component may:
" be developed using services for basic functionalities (security, persistence, &) and auxiliary services for service orchestration, cloud enabling application, service graphical user interface, and proxy for enabling eGovernment in Italy and
" run on a platform independent business component execution environment.

Innovative Aspects

ADVANTAGES
Business advantages, both economics and organizational, derived from:
1. Easy use and customization of the Cosourcing Portal, able to support:
a. Quote management for any size project, from customer first contact until quote submission.
b. Project lifecycle management, from functional artifacts to supporting infrastructure
c. Contract management, including customer financial and administration contacts, providers contacts and artifacts delivery
2. Easy configuration and usage of a Federated Repository, not as a simply set of data, but as an application used to store and retrieve data;
3. Agile approach to any size software development project in cosourcing, with special attention to micro-projects
4. Optional Software Factory for SOA component based application development, where application functionalities concerns are completely separated from tools technology concerns.

INNOVATIONS
Cosourcing in software development is a new business practice trend for companies having the objective of:
" Reducing their IT development costs,
" Maintaining the whole control on the software application development life cycle and
" Optimizing the management of an IT application portfolio.
Furthermore, traditional outsourcing approaches are often optimized for medium to large projects. Cosourcing not only brings a set of modern agile practices and architectures to the world of outsourcing, as well as a lean mindset, but also support micro-projects (projects lasting only a few days), making it a perfect solution for a wider set of companies.

Partner expertise sought:

- Type of partner sought: SMEs, Large enterprises and Public Administration.

- Specific area of activity of the partner: organisations using co-sourcing.

- Task to be performed by the partner sought: companies interested in innovative services to optimize the setup of their cosourcing project to take advantage of agile methodologies and modern architectures and/or looking for IT cosourcer providers.