Tag Archives: jargon

Jargon: Farm-shoring

Farmshoring refers to a specific variety of outsourcing where, apart from services being sourced outside of the contracting company, they are outsourced from urban to rural locations. Governments, especially in the US, offer incentives for shifting employment from offshore to rural communities. It is conceptually similar to onshoring (also referred to as domestic outsourcing). Continue reading Jargon: Farm-shoring

Jargon: Gemba

Gemba, in Japanese, means ‘the actual place’ or ‘the real place’. In business, gemba refers to the place where value is created; in manufacturing the gemba is the factory floor. Its use is extended in IT where the consultant is supposed to assist users at their place so as to make them comfortable with use of the system. It is also suggested that solutions to problems, improvements & ideas will come from going to the gemba. Continue reading Jargon: Gemba

Jargon: Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a newly-coined term for delegating tasks to the open user community, and optionally rewarding results. Typical tasks include testing, verification, development, promotion and evaluation. Free-lancers in IT and contributors on the web, believed to be a key constituent of the Web 2.0 mass collaboration ideology, are central to this process. The ethical, social, and economic implications of crowdsourcing are subject to wide debate. Continue reading Jargon: Crowdsourcing

Jargon: Graceful Degradation

Graceful Degradation, in computing, denotes the fault tolerance capability of a system, technology or product. In web-designing, it refers to blocking advanced features, that cannot be handled by older browsers, without garbling the display or generating errors. Forward compatibility as offered by HTML, is a nice way of browsers ignoring stuff that cannot be understood. In multimedia, it demands bit-rate adaptation based on available bandwidth, without jitter or freezing.