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Staffing and Offshore Operations

Overview

Our People

Data1Qbit is a mission-driven company. Our mission is to change how cyber security decisions are made and how cyber security solutions are deployed. We believe that if we do this, we will help protect the capitalist economies of the world, and even our way of life. We believe this mission is an important one and will attract great people who share this value.

We also believe that the teams of people who run and build our technologies are as important as the technologies themselves. To that end, great care is being taken to create a human resources foundation necessary to attract and retain top talent.

Staffing Requirements

One of the key components of our operations plan is an offshore unit whose primary purpose is manual data research and collection in support of our U.S.-based data collection efforts. We intend to utilize various virtual contractors, as well, which supports our philosophy of leveraging technology to maximize human production, while minimizing human resource overhead.

Though certainly challenging, offshoring, including the employment of virtual workers and contingency (or contract) workers, is being conducted successfully all over the world. "The Harvard Business Review" predicts that by 2018, 1.5 billion people will work virtually, either individually or in remote offices. Many more will serve as contingency workers.

We anticipate that, in addition to manual data collection, our offshore office will handle various content generation and digital marketing tasks that support our U.S. operation. It is anticipated that requirements in this regard will be substantial and on-going, and this is reflected in the headcounts associated with this work. This type of work is ideally suited to college graduates fluent in English, many of whom are available in large numbers in the city and country where we intend to locate.

We are dedicated to developing what is known as a "participant" workforce—to the degree that it is feasible. What this means is that the people doing the work participate in the management of, and are responsible for, the various work processes and productivity. In other words, they contribute in a meaningful way and have a stake in the outcome of the work. Workforces organized around this principle have proven to be more productive, with much less turnover, and they hold particular appeal to more educated workers.

Offshore and Virtual Operations

Quezon City in the Philippines has been selected as the location of our offshore office. Options for establishing such a workforce are to contract with a locally owned firm for these services or to set up and operate these services ourselves. At this time, current planning focuses on opening and operating our own office. The reasons for this are:

  • We want to tightly control the IT infrastructure and human resources involved with our data collection efforts.
  • We want to build the offshore operation into an intellectual property asset with fully dedicated human resources who thoroughly understand our operational processes and needs.

The reasons for selecting the Philippines (and Quezon City in particular) are:

  • The country is stable and continues to enjoy a long association with the U.S., coupled with a U.S. military presence.
  • English is the official language.
  • Quezon City is the most populous and highly urbanized city, with a strong educational infrastructure.
  • Wage rates are relatively low for our target workforce of 30-40 year-old college educated women.
  • There is good broadband internet infrastructure (via four carriers) with direct U.S. connectivity available in the commercial areas of the city.
  • Our founder’s familiarity with the country and previous interaction with its workforce.

We will take the best the U.S. has to offer in terms of gender equality and workplace respect and apply it to the environment over there. We will pay wages that are above market rates, and we will incentivize our workers to perform and become part of the team. This will allow us to attract and retain high quality workers. In addition, various Filipino contractors are already available to be part of the team.

Previous Offshore/Virtual Experience

This business endeavor would be greatly complicated if not for the years of direct offshore/virtual workforce management experience possessed by our founder. This experience consists of the following:

  1. Between 1999-2002, Ray Hutchins set up and operated a 50-person artisan factory in Bali, Indonesia. In 2002 when the business was sold, the factory was producing 800 pieces of hand-painted art per month. The experience of setting up such an operation, training the personnel on the procedures and technologies required to maintain remote production, and implementing effective quality control will serve our operation well.
  2. Since 2003, Hutchins has been operating Denver Web Services, a virtual IT company utilizing global contractors located in India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Serbia, England, the U.S. and other countries.

This global workforce experience has produced a seasoned executive with very deep cross-cultural communication and productivity tools—and the Agile processes necessary to make them work—day after day, year after year. This experience will be critical to our operations.

Management Considerations

While various people are currently engaged in working on this project and are being actively evaluated, the management team (other than the CEO) has not yet been finalized. This team is the most critical element in the human resources plan, and it will be comprised of seasoned business and technology professionals who not only understand and support Data1Qbit’s mission and technology, but who also understand and support our particular mix of human resources.

This issue is made all-the-more important due to the fact that the company’s workforce will be split between two locations and will also utilize a wide and varied range of virtual contractors. According to the current pro-forma, the company will have approximately 70 full time employees, 20 U.S.-based and 50 offshore. This workforce will be supplemented by 30 or more virtual contractors. [See the Technology Plan and the pro-forma in Confidential Documents.]

NOTE: Many of the higher-ranking staff will need to be recruited from other firms, and this will impact ramp-up time frames. This situation is accounted for in the pro-forma.

The management of the offshore team is especially critical, and workforce recruitment and management will necessarily receive special and ongoing attention, as will the physical placement, structure, and security of the office itself. Resources and personnel for establishing the office, recruiting and training the workers, and managing the workflow are identified in the pro-forma.

High-level Organizational Chart

Please refer to the high-level organizational chart below for a quick overview of the management structure. The entire, detailed organizational chart is available in the Confidential Documents section of the business plan.

Scale-up Considerations

It is reasonable to conclude that this business has the potential to experience explosive growth in its customer base and the demand for its data products. Typically speaking, that is a great problem to have, but it can also lead to disaster if not properly planned for and well-resourced. We believe we have adequate IT and operational resources planned and budgeted for the start-up and launch phase through 2016, and then through 2017 - 2019.

Building the IT systems on the AWS platform and leveraging off the pre-built and integrated assets they offer enables us to quickly scale the IT systems to accommodate demand and minimize costs associated with necessary infrastructure. That is one of the inherent benefits of a virtualized cloud operation.

However, the other side of the equation is the human and other resources necessary to accommodate such growth. While the IT systems can do much of the heavy lifting with respect to this business, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that this is a fully automated operation. For this reason, our offshore office will be staffed with adequate management and training resources necessary to ramp up and run our workforce as required to meet our data collection demands.

Two important variables that we control with respect to our growth are the amount and timing of new data products we bring online and the number of new industries (aka domains) we expand into. It can be anticipated that if we achieve success with the rollout of the cyber security domain, there will be heavy pressure to move quickly into new domains to establish early presence and dominance. It will take discipline to resist the temptation to do so until we are confident our systems and resources are fully in place to accommodate such moves.

Correct Cyber Security Decisions Start Here