Interactive Softworks, which sells contact center applications, has added high-quality podcasts as a resource to its Website here:

http://www.interactivesoftworks.com/evolving/index.aspx

The first segment, 23-24 minutes long, includes interviews with industry experts, including Tom Rocca, CEO of KPI Group, which does contact center consulting. If that's too long for you (and as somebody who listens to lots of industry luminaries, I assure you, it can get tedious), you can click on a particular segment and listen to that instead.

If you're in the biz, you could worse than plug in your headset while compiling those month-end reports and tune into Interactive's site to hear about best practices.

How do you summarize a full-day, insight-packed Stanford seminar that explores the topic of the globalization of services? Well, I can't really. But I can offer some notions that stood out for me from the event.

First, people will come from all over the world to rub shoulders with academics and VPs and directors from various companies. That included representatives from Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, Davis, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz; and San Jose State University. It included experts from India service providers TCS, Wipro Infosys and Cognizant. Present were US service providers HP and IBM. And it included client organizations from Cisco to Texas Instruments, from Google to Sun Microsystems. This event is short, inexpensive and crammed with panelists and sessions (butt-lock is probably a fairly common occurrence as breaks are few and brief). It really should be better attended.

Second, there's a definite change in the subjects being discussed among these experts. It's no longer strictly about how to move up the value chain in what is being outsourced offshore -- that's already taking place all over. Companies are coming up with basic ideas and then hiring Indian firms to take care of the details -- from product speccing all the way through manufacture and fulfillment.

It's no longer about how seriously to take Indian companies as business partners; they're here; they're fierce; get used to it. Just consider the number of India-based firms that are buying companies in other parts of the world. They have far greater ambitions than simply taking over our data centers.

Along the same lines, other places in the world have growing services industries too. These countries -- Mexico, the Philippines and China -- may not be as dominant as India, but they offer legitimate alternatives that may work for your specific requirements and situations.

And the notion of geographic boundaries (particularly national ones) becomes quainter with every passing year. As keynoter Francisco D'Souza, the CEO of Cognizant, pointed out, the question, "Where are you from?" becomes more and more difficult to answer. "DNA is becoming delinked from geography at very atomic levels." Personally, I'm from Michigan, California, Ohio, Arizona, Washington and Illinois. Many people would offer a litany of countries instead of states. The same is true for goods -- cars, airplanes, clothing. The same is becoming increasingly true for services.

Third, after hearing "war" stories from participants, I have to laugh when I read statements in press releases such as one from earlier this week, wherein a startup said it was opening an office in India for product development and expects to ramp up from its current three employees to 50 people in the first year. If they're hoping to find experienced, smart people, they'd better crank back on expectations. Talent is tough to find, hire and retain and will cost more than you expect, no matter where you are in the world.

Regarding strategies for offshoring, you can pick from any number of models -- domestic provider/foreign provider; Greenfield; built-operate-transfer; joint ventures; equity partnerships; acquisition; combinations of the above. But, as co-host Rafiq Dossani declared, "Each strategy for offshoring presents different management challenges. And in each you can fail. And in each you can succeed fabulously."

I hope to publish several of the papers touched on during the day. But this is one of those events where the papers don't necessarily mesh with the discussion. You have to be there to absorb all of it.

I've just finished my flip through the weeklies -- eWeek, InformationWeek, InfoWorld -- and the not-quite-weekly CIO. And I have to say, if I were the chief editor for those magazines, I'd start paying more attention to a topic they all cover but don't appear to understand: the internationalization of technology.

Magazines have always outsourced. I mean, that's what hiring freelancers is all about -- getting somebody not in your employ to do work for you. And I don't know any publishing company that handles its own customer service or fulfillment anymore let alone the printing.

Yet, that's as far as it goes -- customer service.

These business-of-tech books all have something in common: Not a one has a single columnist or regular contributor who doesn't live in the United States! A couple -- eWeek and InfoWorld -- are dominated by middle-aged American white men. (And there's nary a woman writing in their pages. InformationWeek used to have Stephanie Stahl in its pages almost every week, but she's been shuttled to an executive editor post that never seems to show up in the printed version of the magazine anymore. But I digress.)

Technology is happening these days in places besides Silicon Valley and Boston. And, in fact, those other geographic locations are stoking the business behind the technology. Yet, aside from big articles where the American writers visit a foreign land to report on what they see there, nobody offers an India or China perspective as a regular part of its coverage.

What prevents these big-budgeted magazines from hiring reporters in Bangalore and Beijing to keep us up to date with trends and news from their parts of the world on a daily and weekly basis?

If I were chief editor for one of those publications, my pages, my coverage, would reflect important insights and information from the whole world of technology, not just the part I can see outside the window of my corner office.

This Knowledge@Wharton article offers a rundown on the various programs that are available to Chinese managers who want or need to learn more about the art of management so they'll do a better job for their companies.

As the piece states, these programs aren't new -- AT&T started offering one back in mid-1980s.

What is new is the desire being expressed by participants to go beyond generic management training. They want to become experts in their own fields -- high tech, telecom, healthcare and so on.

Also, the programs don't limit themselves to operational or communications matters. The Levin Institute's four-month China Executive Software Leadership Program actually takes students to Bloomingdale's "to view Western business attire" and introduces them to chefs at restaurants "where they get a firsthand look at American and French cuisine."

According to this Boston Herald item, Dunkin' Donuts may outsource the creation of its donuts. Say it ain't so!

I still remember the joy I felt in 2001 when heading to Boston from the West coast and seeing the big peach and pink colored signs seemingly everywhere I looked.

The article explains that the company is looking to expand outside its eastern seaboard "stronghold." If they didn't need a space large enough for donut creation, figures the company, maybe more franchisees would come on board.

So who will make the donuts? That's what I want to know. Apparently, they'll be supplied by other DDs that already have the facilities; or possibly franchisees in an area would band together and set up a kitchen offsite somewhere. Deliveries would take place twice a day. That's good enough for me!

So it's not really outsourcing that Dunkin' Donuts is considering. It's more a shared services scenario.

And, by the way, have you ever been to the Dunkin' Donuts Web site? Where the heck are the pictures of the donuts?! Is the company embarrassed or something? Get with it, DD. Gimme a sexy shot of one of those Boston Creme thingies. I miss 'em here in California!