Outsourcing to Africa: Guest Interview Series – Manuel de Joya in Ethiopia

Outsourcing to Africa: Guest Interview Series – Manuel de Joya in Ethiopia: "On July 7 of 2007, Offshoring 2.0, Ethiopia’s very first IT outsourcing center opened its doors for business.

Its parent company, eVentive LLC headquartered in Chicago, launched the center shortly after eVentive graduated its first team of Ethiopian trainees, in the capital city of Addis Ababa.

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I met my guest, Manuel de Joya, a Managing Partner at eVentive through a popular social networking site early this year, and was highly impressed by his work in Ethiopia. Manuel and I have exchanged emails several times since then, and I finally had the opportunity to interview him about his company, eVentive, and why they chose Ethiopia as their offshore partner."

Below is an outline of the discussions I have had with Manuel:

Question (QTN): Hi Manuel. Could you provide us with a brief professional background of yourself.

I have been in IT since 1986 and in consulting since 1987. I have worked as a principal and in senior management in a number of firms.

eVentive LLC has been in existence since 2002. Our management team is made up of three partners - Yemiru Chanyalew, who is our CEO, Doug Deneau and myself. Because of the nature of system integration and the volume of work being sent offshore, Yemiru had a vision to change our business model to deliver work from offshore. So in 2007, we began the process of transforming our business, and this is when I got involved.

QTN: What specifically motivated you to set up eVentive’s offshore component in Ethiopia?

I believe there are three tenets of success in IT outsourcing:

The first is the educational base of the people. You need to consider if the location is capable of producing a sufficient number of graduates in various disciplines over the long-term. In other words, is the education system capable of supporting a steady pipeline of potential employees?

Secondly, you need to consider the infrastructure, the most important being telecommunication and the availability of electric power.

Another important factor is the ease of procuring the hardware and software you will need in your operation. In USA this is done very efficiently through e-commerce.

The last is training. Is there a capability to train potential workers in business practice, in the technical aspects of the business, in the languages they will need, and so on.

When considering Ethiopia, I looked at first three layers and was satisfied. But we needed the fourth layer, which was training.

We found there was a high level technical skills, but most of the potential employees had not had the opportunity to work with firms from other countries. This is a fairly common experience, even in other countries. We needed to close this gap, so we developed a program for Ethiopia.

QTN: How did prepare your Ethiopian staff to handle outsourced IT projects?

We hired the best possible people, and then trained them to the level required for the tasks ahead. We call this 360 degree training through our BlueNile SED(tm) program.

There were three major aspects:

First, was a technical track, to introduce advanced technical skills to supplement the knowledge the potential employees already had.

Second was training in business skills.

Third was development of the architecture of deliverables, which included the development methodology and project management.

By July 2007, with a 100% graduation rate, we had our first recruits and opened our doors for business.

QTN: Were you able to utilize local talent for senior management positions?

Yes, we have a local partner and a project manager involved.