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The Official Magazine of the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals
GlobalizationToday Commerce Redefined
March 2011
VIEWS FROM THE TOP
WE SURVEY THE THOUGHT LEADERS OF OUTSOURCING Thought leaders at the 2011 Outsourcing World Summit share their vision
(page 16)
Also in this issue: Our daily blog from the Summit Project Management: Art or Science? The Importance of Social Responsibility
Also in this issue:
Capitalizing on Software-as-a-Service Why Microsourcing is the Next Big Trend The IAOP “World Connection”
The Outsourcing Hall of fame
Sandy Ogg, former chief human resource officer, Unilever and William F. Concannon, president - global corporate services, CB Richard Ellis were presented with The 2011 Outsourcing Hall of Fame award by Atul Vashistha, COP, CEO of Neo Advisory and chair of IAOP’s Advocacy & Outreach Committee (second from left); Debi Hamill, senior managing director, IAOP; and Michael F. Corbett, chairman, IAOP (far right) at IAOP’s Outsourcing World Summit, Indian Wells, California, February 22, 2011.
OUTSOURCING H A l l O f fA M E IAOP’s Outsourcing Hall of Fame is one of the most prestigious awards available to individuals working in the
IAOP: IMPROVING OUTSOURCING OUTCOMES BY CONNECTING YOU TO THE RESOURCES YOU NEED
IAOP® is the global, standard-setting organization and advocate for the outsourcing profession.
to help companies achieve better business results through outsourcing.
Provider/Advisor Corporate Membership With a global community of more than 110,000 members and affiliates worldwide, IAOP is the leading professional association for organizations and individuals involved in transforming the world of business through outsourcing, offshoring and shared services.
provides the same organization-wide benefits of Customer Corporate Membership, but also includes member-only sponsorship opportunities that serve the marketing and business development needs of these companies.
for their contributions to the
A Global Community, IAOP has mem-
management practice and
bers in nearly 50 countries. Each member has direct, online access to other members and to IAOP’s entire portfolio of services, including its vast chapter network, regional-level events, and corporate and professional development programs.
to individuals either as part of their company’s corporate membership or on an individual basis. This membership serves the needs of practitioners working in the field of outsourcing whether as customers, providers or advisors. In addition, it provides these professionals with direct, personal access to association services.
field of outsourcing. The Hall of Fame recognizes individuals not only
industry of outsourcing, but to society at-large through outsourcing. On behalf of IAOP’s global community and outsourcing professionals around the world, IAOP congratulates i t s 2 0 11 i n d u c t e e s .
MEMBERSHIP Customer Corporate Membership
Professional Membership is available
To learn more about IAOP, visit www.IAOP.org.
provides organization-wide access to the association’s research, training, certification and networking programs — all designed
International Association of Outsourcing Professionals® (IAOP®)
Tel +1.845.452.0600
fax +1.845.452.6988
www.IAOP.org
INSIDE March 2011 7 PUBLISHER’S NOTE 8 NEWS FEED
What’s new and noteworthy in global commerce.
28 BUILDING A BETTER OUTSOURCING COMMUNITY
by Mary Lacity and Joseph Rottman
Two widely respected academics review the findings of the 2011 IAOP World Summit Survey. Their analysis of the empirical data will enlighten you. Get ready to have your assumptions challenged.
34 DIAGNOSING AND TREATING UNHEALTHY OUTSOURCING RELATIONSHIPS
by Sara Enlow and Jospeph Bubman
You can’t fix a problem in your outsourcing engagement before you know a problem exists. Here’s a how-to guide that reveals ways to pinpoint inefficiencies and avoid the pitfalls.
33 PROJECT MANAGEMENT: AN ART OR A SKILL?
by Leanne Cullen
Is project management an art or a skill? Is it something that you can learn or is it more intrinsic than that – more deep-rooted in someone’s behavioural traits? Read on, for the answers.
38 THE CSR FACTOR
by Ron Babin and Bill Hefley
Does Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) play a role in your outsourcing decisions? Of course! Here’s why.
40 IAOP WORLD CONNECTION
16
THE VIEW FROM THE SUMMIT
46 SCRAPBOOK
by John Persinos
Our editorial director filed frequent, intraday blog dispatches from the show floor of the 2011 World Outsourcing Summit in Indian Wells, California. Here’s a wrap-up of his observations and insights.
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RecRuitment pRocess outsouRcing
business pRocess outsouRcing
contingent woRkfoRce outsouRcing
Human ResouRces consulting
caReeR tRansition & oRganizational effectiveness
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EDITORIAL and PRODUCTION
Get Listed in Globalization Today’s Buyer’s Guide All Globalization Today subscribers have complete access to our Buyer’s Guides that allow them to quickly find and purchase outsourcing and offshoring related products and services. Globalization Today offers a free basic listing to providers in the following categories: • Information Technology • Internet & Web • Consulting • Business Process • Human Resources • Art & Design • Medical & Billing • Printing & Publishing • Writing & Editing • Engineering & Architecture • Finance • Virtual Assistantship
Go to www.globalizationtoday.com to get your FREE listing!
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR John Persinos john.persinos@globalizationtoday.com AD PRODUCTION MANAGER Donna Eastman donna.eastman@globalizationtoday.com GRAPHIC DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Webstaze Design Studio www.webstaze.com
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr. Bruce Greenwald Prof. Asset Management and Finance Columbia Business School Dr. Matt Waller Prof. Marketing and Logistics University of Arkansas Dr. John Hindle Sr. Manager - Accenture, Adjunct Prof Vanderbilt University Mike Corbett Chairman - International Association of Outsourcing Professionals Matt Shocklee CEO & President - Global Sourcing Optimization Services Arijit Sengupta CEO of BeyondCore, Inc Chair of the Cloud Computing Chapter of IAOP
Address: 6501 E. Greenway Pkwy., Ste 103-494 Scottsdale, AZ, 85254, USA Phone: 1-602-492-4194
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The Global Village
Ali Comelek
Founder and Publisher
The verdict is in: the 2011 Outsourcing World Summit, held February 21-23 in Indian Wells, California, was a resounding success. I visited the show with our editorial director, John Persinos. It was a phenomenal event, attended by hundreds of outsourcing executives from across the industry and around the world. The Summit was an unbeatable venue for networking with colleagues and peers from all reaches of the globe. To learn more about the Summit, turn to page 16, to read a compendium of the daily blog postings that John filed on an intraday basis from the show floor. John covered the show like a blanket; you can read his observations in these pages, or by punching up this URL: http://globalizationtoday.com/blog-heading/ Meanwhile, Globalization Today magazine, speaking for the entire outsourcing community, sends its prayers to the Japanese, in this hour of their need. Unless you live in a cave, you’re doubtless aware that a massive 8.9 earthquake hit northeastern Japan on March 11, the biggest seismic event in recorded Japanese history. The earthquake triggered a tsunami that sent waves as high as office buildings slamming into Japan’s coast, wiping out entire villages and triggering partial meltdowns at three nuclear reactors. Tens of thousands were reported killed, as unstoppable walls of water carried away homes, cars and planes and washed out major roads, highways, bridges, and power lines. The scenes of wholesale destruction are horrific -- and nothing short of apocalyptic. As the country’s prime minister asserted, this natural disaster is Japan’s harshest crisis since World War II. The threat of destruction carried as far as the U.S. West Coast, which has been put on alert for high waves and radioactive leaks from Japan’s stricken nuclear reactors. Indeed, the magnitude of the tsunami was such that the entire Pacific has been put on an emergency footing. Japan, the world’s third largest economy, will take months — perhaps years — to recover. The country’s stock market has plummeted; the scale of the necessary rebuilding is hard to fathom. We wish God speed to our friends in this important economy and ancient culture. This tragic event is a reminder that we do indeed live in Global Village and all of our fates are interconnected. This interconnectedness is something serious to ponder, for those of us in the outsourcing profession.
Founder and Publisher Globalization Today Magazine “Official Publication of IAOP” www.GlobalizationToday.com 1-602-492-4194
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NEWS FEED
NEWS Feed
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IN THE WORLD OF OUTSOURCING
JAPAN’S DISASTER A MIXED BAG FOR OUTSOURCING By John Persinos, Editorial Director
To the fears of multiple nuclear meltdowns at Japan’s crippled power plants, add another fear: economic meltdown. The recent 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in Japan — and the resultant cascade of disasters and horrors — sharply pushed down Japanese stocks and the entire global equity markets. Vast swathes of land were devastated by the earthquake and the wall of water it sent toward Japan’s northeastern coast, necessitating reconstruction on a scale not seen in that star-crossed country since World War II. Considerable focus now is on the movement of the yen, which if it appreciates will drive up the cost of domestic rebuilding. Asia is a major area of outsourcing activity. Japan’s staggering woes are throwing all plans and forecasts for outsourcing into a cocked hat. And yet, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. It’s a delicate matter, to see the silver lining in a catastrophe of such unfathomable human dimensions, but other countries are likely to reap economic windfalls from the construction work. Specifically, developing Asian countries that already serve as magnets for outsourcing — Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, chief among them — are poised to profit from Japan’s need to outsource construction work. As Japan’s domestic economy continues to reel, it’s capacity to undertake its own construction work also lies in serious disrepair. Japan already remains stuck in a
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decades-long recession. With these latest hammer blows, the country’s economy won’t bounce back anytime soon. However, even though it may seem callous to point this out, many nonJapanese construction companies and oil and gas producers will get large, profitable contracts from the crisis. China and Japan already share strong trade links. China, which recently surpassed Japan as the world’s secondlargest economy, is well-positioned to ink
deals for huge amounts of infrastructure rebuilding that the Japanese will be compelled to outsource. At the same time, China already sends about 21 percent of its oil exports and nearly 36 percent of its coal exports to Japan, percentages that are bound to increase as Japan looks for new energy sources to replace its loss of nuclear power. To the greatest degree since 1945, the Japanese will need to lean on outsiders to get back on its feet.
NEWS FEED
IBM UNVEILS $38M CLOUD COMPUTING CENTER IN SINGAPORE www.globalservicesmedia.com
IBM announced a US$38M investment in a new IBM Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Data Center in Singapore. The new centre will provide businesses with solutions and services to harness the potential of cloud computing. Scheduled to launch in April, the centre will make available IBM’s cloud services and technology portfolio, Chris Morris, director of Cloud Services & Technologies, IDC Asia/Pacific, expects the Asia/Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ) market for cloud computing services to annually grow by an average of 40 percent until 2014, to reach US$4.9 billion a year. “A major driver of this growth has been the new regional data centres which are now emerging to provide the necessary infrastructure for growth of the key cloud service areas,” Morris said. “This increased availability of enterprise-class cloud services will underpin the acceleration of cloud services in APEJ, as cloud service
shifts from the SMB [Small-to-Medium sized Business] sector to the large enterprise.” The first offering available at the centre is designed to provide rapid access to security-rich, enterprise-class virtual server environments and is suited for development and test activities and other dynamic workloads. It is designed to help enterprises reduce operational
costs; eliminate capital outlays; improve cycle times for faster time-to-market; and improve quality with instant and secure access to a standardised infrastructure as a service environment. Cloud computing allows users to run software applications and store, edit, and retrieve data over the internet from large networks of remote web servers rather than on users’ own computers.
FROM COAL MINE TO CALL CENTER: INVESTMENT PROPELS CHILEAN TOWN www.nearshoreamericas.com
In Lota, a struggling former mining town on Chile’s Pacific coast, investments in IT and worker re-training programs are
helping residents connect into the 21st Century global economy. Historically, the town’s economic and cultural life centered on the nearby coal mines. But, after the mines closed, Lota had trouble attracting new investment and promoting job growth. In recent years, Chile’s government launched programs to re-train workers, provide young students with technical skills, and encourage IT businesses to open offices in Lota. Thanks in part to investment projects like the Banco Estado call center, an IT center that opened in 2001, hiring 160 local employees, Lota’s residents are now working to transition away from the mines and seek work in new sectors of the economy. More broadly, Chile’s government is now looking toward IT sector development as an important new engine of economic growth. Chile is a country that has earned a reputation for good governance and
solid economic managemen. These days, the country is working hard to promote investment in IT services and data centers. In 2010, Chilean IT firms earned over US$1 billion in revenues. Some analysts predict that by 2015 this figure could increase five-fold to US$5 billion. IT investment is helping to spread the benefits of economic development to the poorer parts of Chile. The Banco Estado call center, for example, sits perched on a hill overlooking Lota’s densely populated, downtown district. Because of the town’s storied mining past, and highly publicized economic troubles, Ricardo Lagos, Chile’s president from 2000 to 2006, believes Lota could become an example of the country’s broader transition. One of his first projects as president was to order Banco Estado, the country’s state-owned bank, to locate its national Internet and telephone sales office in Lota, creating 160 jobs.
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NEWS FEED
MAJOR CORPORATIONS POISED TO CAPITALIZE ON LATIN AMERICA’S “NEW FRONTIER” www.nearshoreamericas.com
The new blog Nearshore Americas has learned at least three large US-based companies with global operations are on the verge of announcing that they will establish new shared services operations in Latin America. In one case, the firm is consolidating processes from the US, Canada and Latin
American into the new Latin American location. All three also are establishing captive operations centers. The companies, which insisted on anonymity, attended “Shared Services and Outsourcing Week”, March 1-3, in Orlando, Florida. Details of the three companies’ plans have not been announced, but the general disclosures reinforce the findings of Deloitte’s 2011 “Global Shared Services” research, which was also reviewed at “Shared Services and Outsourcing Week.” The Deloitte presentation, which called Latin America the new frontier, said that Latin America was the second most popular destination for new centers, and found that companies establishing new facilities in Latin America were likely to be following the growth of Latin markets for their companies’ products. The three companies have, in passing, either publicly or privately, mentioned that they are in the process of moving or consolidating shared services activities in Latin America. Other companies, including Sears Holdings, have discussed their plans to shift operations to other locations. Sears is moving certain shared services operations to India and will be outsourcing there with Wipro, the giant information technology services corporation headquartered in Bangalore, India
Confirming Deloitte’s finding that Latin America was outsourcing’s New Frontier and that activity was following growing business in Latin America, the three companies indicated that their Latin American choices were influenced by where the companies are already actively doing business. They said that they have familiarity with the countries and local business practices, and their location decision was driven, in some way, by the proximity of the new location to existing and growing business activity within the region. Nearshore Americas expects to be providing detailed reporting on at least two companies’ decision processes and their imminent moves, and has agreed not to make pubic the companies’ names until they are closer to announcing the changes both publicly and internally. The three companies operate in very different industries. One is a well known consumer packaged goods company that is establishing a global operations center in Asia with a new regional hub in Latin America. Another is a businessto-business industrial wholesaler consolidating certain hemispheric finance and accounting activities in Latin America. The third is an auto parts manufacturer
LACK OF LATAM QUALITY STANDARDS: WILL IT REDUCE NEARSHORE MARKET SHARE? By Tarun George | www.nearshoreamericas.com
When buyers look at the Nearshore region, they may see a lot of talent, but they may not see many ways to mitigate risk. That’s why quality standards and their certifications are so important to be implemented, according to Jane Siegel, Director of IT Sqc, Senior Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and special guest speaker at Nearshore Nexus, April 26, in New York City. With the exception of a few forward-looking initiatives (like Chile’s focus on IT standards), the LatAm public and private sector for the most part
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are unaware of the business value that certifications like ISO can accrue. Meanwhile, providers from India with strong quality standards in place are gaining more visibility, even on home turf in the Nearshore. As Siegel tells us in this special interview, the fact is that buyers want to see quality, and are willing to pay for it. In terms of implementing quality standards, especially for higher level value added work, how do providers from the Nearshore region compare to
those from rival geographies like India? Siegel: In terms of service providers from certain geographies, none of the other locations have adopted the same level of quality standards as the major Indian companies. If you go to any major Indian provider – Wipro, Infosys, HCL – they will have in place anywhere between six and ten different standards that they’re certified with. This is also true for any of the big global companies like Accenture, IBM, HP. Those firms have been involved
NEWS FEED
in international standards development through ISO for a very long time, and have a history of understanding the need for quality standards and incorporating them into their service delivery. They see the business value in clients being assured of having defined and certifiable processes in place when they take on a project. But in Latin America, those global providers need to be differentiated from the homegrown firms, which often don’t bother much with quality standards. The tendency for many smaller LatAm service providers is to assume that if they do good work, they’ll be able to grow. In some cases that strategy has worked, but in many cases companies reach a size of a 1000 to 2000 employees and then they can’t expand into international markets because they haven’t planned for or figured out how to get those certifications in place. So is the lack of quality standards in Latin America significant enough a factor to lose the region outsourcing market share in the coming years? Siegel: It’s a very significant factor, so potentially yes. In Latin America if you go to IBM Brazil, they will have all of the certifications, and can compete with the best providers anywhere in the world. That’s a decision they’ve made to increase their competitiveness with other providers. So when a buyer is looking for a Nearshore solution, if they want a high level assurance of quality, they’re often willing to pay the higher price. The alternative is going with
a mid-size or smaller homegrown LatAm service provider. That provider might have very talented people, but if big clients can’t mitigate their risk by seeing proper quality standards put in place through certifications, they’ll be less inclined to take their business there. Why has the Nearshore region been unable to implement those quality standards? What are the obstacles that stand in the way? Siegel: One obstacle has been the economics of it. Service providers have to absorb a large expense in order to implement quality standards. But there’s also a key role for the public sector in this. In China for example, the government sees quality standards as an issue of competitiveness, and so it has been subsidizing the cost of certification and standards execution for many Chinese companies. To put this in perspective, those efforts started only about five or six years ago, whereas for India, they started in the 1980s. In Latin America, there are a few notable initiatives, but those efforts still haven’t really started. That means the Nearshore is effectively decades behind in this area, and will need to be quite aggressive if it wants to catch up. That leads to the second obstacle – awareness on the part of decision makers about what role quality standards play, and their ability to acquire the company new business. Latin America still has not understood the important of quality certifications. That being said, one thing
that is starting to happen is that Latin America companies doing good work are starting to get acquired by the bigger global players (think CPM Braxis that recently got bought by Capgemini). What should buyers be aware of when dealing with quality standards and certifications? Siegel: It doesn’t matter what the nature of the outsourcing work is, high capability providers that operate internationally know what standards they need to comply with and will have invested in them. But realize that it does cost to be assured of that quality, and buyers should not be naïve about that. Globally the one standard that virtually every company that’s doing international business has in place is ISO 9001. That’s essentially the ‘floor’ for doing international business – the basic requirement. But all it says is that the provider has some kind of quality management system in place. It doesn’t really give the buyer a notion of how good the provider’s processes are, or what the specifics are of its quality management system. So one of the issues raised in the international standards community is whether there needs to be some modification, or some additional certification. Something new is needed to really give clients concerned about ITIL compliance an idea about whether those practices are being implemented by a service provider they’re considering.
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NEWS FEED
RECENT OUTSOURCING DEALS Intelenet Global Services Private Limited has signed a five-year outsourcing partnership with Tata Teleservices Limited, one of India’s private telecom service providers. This partnership elevates Intelenet’s position and makes the Company the first player to offer Finance & Accounting processes in the telecom vertical. Intelenet will provide a spectrum of services, covering back-office processes and customer support functions, within the F&A BPO domain. Intelenet will provide account payable services pan-India for all the 22 circles of Tata Teleservices from its existing delivery centers. Unisys Corporation announced that its New Zealand subsidiary has been selected to provide Unisys Stealth Solution data protection technology to car rental company Hertz New Zealand to help secure and protect Hertz customers’ credit card data against fraud. The patentpending Unisys Stealth Solution uses data encryption and bit-splitting technology to secure data. Using the Stealth Solution, organisations can define communities of interest--specific groups of users-and segregate access to data on a shared network or storage system so that one community of interest cannot access another’s data. buyingTeam, Europe’s largest procurement outsourcing specialist, announced the renewal of its partnership with Universal Music UK, signing an extended three-year contract worth in excess of US$2 million. buyingTeam has been working with Universal since 2003 to improve business performance through better procurement practices, including active cost management and the realisation of resulting savings. The company will continue to oversee the management of Universal Music’s indirect expenditure, ranging from media and creative services to facilities and overhead costs.
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5 THINGS ACCENTURE’S CIO HAS LEARNED ABOUT CLOUD COMPUTING By Stephanie Overby | www.cio.com
Frank Modruson has a thing for better, faster, cheaper. As CIO of business and IT service provider Accenture, that’s what he wants to deliver to his internal customers and what they in turn promise to their clients. “I’m a big believer in technology and a big believer that technology helps the business in a lot of ways,” Modruson says. “But it needs to be better, faster or cheaper. If you hit all three, it starts to get very compelling.” In the last few years, cloud computing has gotten very compelling for Accenture. Modruson’s first foray into the cloud was a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) recruiting system five years ago. Today, Accenture has two dozen applications in the cloud. He’s made moves to prepare the organization for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), introducing a single IP network for voice and data and aggressively pursuing server, database and storage virtualization in the
corporate data center. And that’s just a start, he says. The outsourcing giant’s CIO (named in 2010 to CIO Magazine’s CIO Hall of Fame) shared his biggest lessons learned about cloud computing with CIO.com. 1. The cloud can take you places you couldn’t go before. Five years ago, Accenture had a different recruiting system in every country. In the U.S., there was a custom software system. In another country, recruiting was tracked by spreadsheet. At the time, Accenture had 90,000 employees. A total of 210,000 employees and millions of applications later, Modruson has decommissioned the IT systems in 40 countries. “We had the existing U.S. workflow and system, but going around the world and trying to implement that in 40 countries would have been kind of ludicrous,” says Modruson.
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2. Resistance is a given. Accenture is in the people business; recruiting is a core competency. Thus, the tendency within the firm was to think the recruiting software has to be special. “One of the nice things about SaaS is you can really push the business to say, ‘What do we really need to do here?’ Recruiting may be one of our secret sauces but emailing back a candidate or letting them apply online— that just enables the process. The secret sauce is not the software,” Modruson says. Some business users balked. They wanted all the new capabilities but the look and feel of the way they used to do things. “At a certain point, it just becomes an excuse,” says Modruson. “We went through the same thing with our [traditional ERP] system.” Over time, with targeted training and open communication, people will understand the new system and its benefits.
3. Security is a red herring. “Security tends to be something that people focus on a lot, and they should,” says Modruson. “You want your information to be secure. “ The perception that something under your control is inherently more secure is misguided, he says. Is your money safer in the bank or under your mattress? Cloud vendors, because of their scale, may invest much more in security than a single enterprise ever would, Modruson says. The key is to approach cloud security diligently: test, monitor, review. 4. Transformation takes time (lots of time). Modruson began the journey towards IaaS more than five years ago by rationalizing applications, blowing up the old corporate network, and doing serious data center virtualization. He’s whittled down the company’s application portfolio down from 2,100 systems down to 530. (The
application reduction work has been going on for more than 10 years.) Accenture has virtualized more than 80 percent of its servers, 220 databases are now supported by 30 physical servers (down from 449), and physical storage has remained static even as the company’s storage needs have ballooned 122 percent during the last two years. “If you play it out correctly it allows you to move things around from server to server without regard to specific hardware configuration,” says Modruson. “That positions us not just to take costs out of our existing environment but it will allow us to move to someone else’s cloud.” But adoption of IaaS is still a ways in the future. “[Cloud adoption] can happen faster at smaller and mid size companies or startups,” Modruson says. 5. Your legacy systems are costlier than you think. Most enterprises Accenture’s size are mired in multiple generations of software and hardware, Modruson says. “You might think [those systems are] cheap because they’re totally depreciated, but they can be difficult to support. Those are like cement shoes,” he says. “It makes it hard for CIOs to move forward. You have to take a look at your technology footprint and figure out how to leave your past behind.”
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TRADE SHOWS
The View from The Summit Our editorial director, John Persinos, filed frequent, intraday blog dispatches from the show floor of the 2011 World Outsourcing Summit in Indian Wells, California. Here’s a wrap-up of his observations and insights. By John Persinos Michael F. Corbett, chairman, IAOP, addressed the “hot button” issue of social responsibility. FIRST DAY OF THE SHOW: OASIS IN THE DESERT
Palm Springs, California is a stunningly beautiful place — a patchwork of palm trees and verdant golf courses nestled amid snow-capped mountains. It’s especially beautiful when I consider the fact that it’s snowing heavily in my resident state of Rhode Island as I type this. I spoke with organizers of the 2011 Outsourcing World Summit tonight, at a cocktail party for session speakers. This is the evening before the show; I attended the soiree at the show hotel, to get the mood of the show before it starts. It’s apparent that this year’s outing reflects a sunny outlook for outsourcing that matches the balmy weather of this Southern California paradise. Consider this: the Summit this year claims attendance of at least 700 individuals, whereas the previous year’s confab claimed about 500. Pretty good, in the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. So what will be the salient theme of this year’s outing? “The fact that we simply survived the economic downturn,” said Michael Forbes, manager of member services for IAOP. I spoke with Michael at the speaker cocktail party. “It appears that the global economy, and by extension the outsourcing business, is in a rebound,” he added. The show starts tomorrow morning.
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TRADE SHOWS Watch this space, for further updates as your intrepid correspondent provides intraday dispatches from the summit. DAY ONE: YOUR NETWORK IS YOUR NET WORTH
I’m writing this from a “customer-only” networking session at the Summit, within the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort, the show hotel. The room is packed with about 100 people. A few minutes ago, I was in the adjoining room, speaking with folks who are attending the parallel “provider/advisoronly” networking session, also attended by about 100 people. Different perspectives; same goals. Each room is buzzing with animated conversation, as everyone shares their gripes, concerns, insights, and personal
experiences with outsourcing, from their own perspectives. It’s a useful and fascinating exercise. No one would go on the record with me — after all, this networking session is designed to be anonymous. If attendees aren’t on the record, they feel less inhibited with their opinions. The purpose here is to encourage people to let down their hair and speak their mind. (And boy, are they.) Moreover, as the only member of the press here at the show, some of the attendees are understandably wary about being interviewed on the record. Nonetheless, I was able to coax some interesting observations from the participants in each room, by promising anonymity. One recurring issue was the need to establish criteria for the effective monitoring of outsourcing. “Companies need to do a better job
of implementing specific controls for monitoring the quality of outsourcing, to make sure that proper standards are maintained,” one participant told me. “The business owners can’t just walk away from vendors. Sure, they can step back, but they also must keep an eye on how procedures are followed.” In other words, the outsourcing of responsibilities should not lapse into the abrogation of responsibilities. In terms of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), the necessary upfront work always must be conducted, to identify goals. As one participant put it: “You need to determine: is your overriding goal to save money, to save time, or both? Then discovery and due diligence come in. Which are the best possible vendors? Then, once you find the right vendor, you need to make sure that they possess the correct skill sets. There’s a long lead-in to get to where you want to go. You can’t give short shrift to making sure the vendor has the right competencies. I can’t emphasize that enough.” The number one competency that customers look for? “Someone who has come out of consulting, who is well-rounded and detail oriented, is what we look for,” is what one person told me. ” They need to be able to work with teams and see the big picture, to gather disparate information and to synthesize it. Those from a consultancy, who think strategically and have seen it all, are most preferred from my perspective.” Another big issue that I heard discussed was ways in which companies maintain cyber security when outsourcing. The most precious commodity in the global economy is information; keeping that information safe was portrayed as a paramount concern by everyone in the room. The growing ranks of hackers, terrorists and cyber criminals are growing more resourceful and adept with each passing day; staying one step ahead of the constant array of insidious cyber threats is a continuing concern for the outsourcing community — from the perspective of both customers and providers. “We make sure that our vendors have all of the necessary checks and balances in place, when it comes to IT and physical security,” one participant told me. “Security must be a holistic concern, shared by the entire organization from top to bottom and across the supply chain. It can’t be
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Call-to-Action Outsourcing Insights by WNS
Can Call Center Consolidation Help the Burgeoning Hospitality Industry? Todd Dirks, Vice President, Travel and Leisure Services, WNS Global Services
Further adding to the challenge of consistency in hospitality call center operations, is the complexity associated with managing diverse ownership structures of their hotels. REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), franchisees, management companies and owned properties often have differing views and goals of how contact center operations should be conducted. However, consolidation and centralization of fragmented centers remains a key solution that can provide economies-of-scale and cost reduction while improving performance. Benefits of Call Center Consolidation Cost Reduction: Centralization of activities in a call center means a significant reduction in real estate cost as investments are in one location instead of many. Next, centralized operations mean fewer managers, supervisors, reporting analysts and workforce management analysts. The reduced overhead enables call centers to bolster the front-line, customer-facing agents. Consolidation invariably means lower salary and costs per employee at the central site as compared to the average spend for all the fragmented sites. There is also reduction in equipment costs with fewer telephony systems, computing and networking devices. This means a drop in the cost of system integration. Larger platforms are easier and cheaper to integrate into customer relationship management applications, workforce management applications, networking and other technologies. The bi-annual hotel survey conducted by the Hogg Robinson Group (HRG) reveals that the international hotel industry has shown signs of recovery in the first half of 2010. The survey found that a majority of the cities surveyed, although not yet in positive growth, certainly recorded an improvement in performance. While the industry has begun to show signs of recovery, the need for disciplined cost management persists. As we emerge from the recession, the corporate landscape of all sectors has been undeniably altered. This holds true for the hospitality industry as well. With sinking occupancies during the downturn, RevPARs (Revenue Per Available Room) and profits, hoteliers who had incurred large debts were forced into selling. Thus, the hotel industry has witnessed a spate of mergers and acquisitions post-recession. Mid-August, 2010, saw Sunstone Hotel Investors acquiring the Royal Palm, located in Miami Beach, Florida. According to Reuters, CDL Hospitality Trust from Singapore is on the lookout for acquisitions in India, Vietnam and Japan, having set aside over USD 400 million for the same. Reuters also confirmed that Accor, Europe's largest hotelier had set aside a war chest of over USD 130 million per year to buy hotels that were forced to sell as a result of the economic downturn. Fragmented Call Centers and the Need for Consolidation While major hotel chains continue to grow their global footprint, along with the rooms and facilities, they also acquire fragmented reservation centers. Though many believe that 'localization' of call centers provides benefits of knowing the native language and culture, the fact is that it translates into a significant cost increase and also affects service delivery. Increased infrastructure cost, delays in disaster recovery, longer turnaround times to deploy new technologies and processes, lack of standardization, limited labor pools, and inconsistency in service delivery and customer experience are some of the issues that hoteliers can face with decentralized call centers.
Decreased Redundancy: Consolidation eliminates redundancy. With fragmented contact centers, there are several departments that are designing and working on the same function, such as payroll. A consolidated accounting department translates into creating a single payroll system across the organization. Increased Staff Efficiency: Along with operational efficiency (consolidating all employees onto a single e-mail platform, or chat), hotels can benefit from centralized training and quality assurance through consolidation. For example, one centralized QA and training of staff can be deployed instead of separate groups at every site. A large site also enables a higher number of agents to report to one supervisor when compared to a smaller site. Simplified Technology Implementation: A consolidated call center means that it is easier to test and maintain new technologies and processes. The center can have dedicated IT staff, which is not always possible in a fragmented set-up. Bulk Discounts: Equipment costs are lower for a consolidated center. Telecom savings are possible as most carriers offer reduced rates for larger volumes. Similarly, there are also reductions in hardware, software and maintenance. Support costs drop as technical resources are needed at only one site. Spread Organizational Culture: An organization's culture is a by-product of its people. Increasing levels of diversity in fragmented centers pose challenges of effectively permeating the desired single culture throughout the organization. Consolidation, on the other hand, ensures that the identity of the organization is consistent through all employee levels. Brand Representation: Effective representation of the brand is as important as the culture. And, few can dispute the close relationship between customer service and brand perception. A consolidated call center can handle customer service more effectively and thus, succeed in brand positioning.
Marketing Effectiveness: Hotel companies constantly launch campaigns and programs to drive increased occupancy, retain customers and earn new ones. Communication of the numerous marketing initiatives is problematic in a fragmented environment, and certainly requires more effort. Consolidation enables quicker execution on the targets of the campaigns thus increasing the effectiveness and ROI. Models for Call Center Consolidation Typically multinational corporations have grown on a country-tocountry basis. The same goes for the hospitality industry, where companies have expanded organically or inorganically, and this has led to call centers being set up in multiple geographies. Clearly, consolidation is a critical requirement and listed below are the major models that can be considered. Geographical Consolidation: In this model, all calls are routed to one central location – Pan European, Pan American or Pan Asian. This central location is equipped to handle calls in all native languages increasing efficiency. Regional Hubs: This model is along the lines of the previous one, only that it is on a much smaller scale. For instance, setting up a Nordic Center that could handle all the Scandinavian countries. Major and Minor Markets: In this model, larger countries such as U.K., Germany and France have their own centers. One call center serves the smaller countries that have not yet reached critical mass. Country Centers: Depending on the size of the operations of the company, different call centers are retained in every country. Networking techniques enable the sites to be linked together to form a larger pool of agents. Follow-the-Sun: In this model, consolidation is on a global basis wherein worldwide centers are selected. Typically, three main locations like Europe, America and Asia, house these centers. Being in different time zones, these centers are able to provide roundthe- clock service by routing calls to the appropriate location. There is certainly a compelling case for consolidation of call centers in the hospitality industry. It is sure to achieve significant operational improvements. Economies-of-scale will improve both cost and service performance, and this will provide the much-needed competitive advantage in the current economic scenario. Today, with a variety of deployment models and efficient service provider offerings, consolidation of call centers is definitely a practical solution for hospitality organizations.
For more insights on outsourcing or our service offerings, visit wns.com. Alternatively, you can write to us at info@wns.com
Need to improve operational performance? Talk to a business process outsourcing service provider with a strong track record for delivery. With over 21,000 employees located in 21 delivery centers around the world, WNS extends the enterprise of over 200 organizations by improving their business performance. To learn how we can help extend your enterprise, visit wns.com.
TRADE SHOWS
The Summit this year generated at least 700 registrants, compared to about 500 at last year’s outing.
compartmentalized.” I was particularly impressed during this morning’s networking sessions by the questionnaires that IAOP handed out to everyone. In my mind, the most important question on the survey is: * What is the one attitude or behavior you wish [that those with whom you conduct outsourcing business] would change in order to build a better outsourcing community? On Wednesday, all of the groups — customers, providers, and advisors — will meet over breakfast to share what each stakeholder requests from the other two stakeholders to help build a better outsourcing community. The results of the survey will be read out loud and shared with the entire, consolidated group. OUTSOURCING RESPONSIBILITY: EXCLUSIVE
AND NOT
SOCIAL MUTUALLY
You have to hand it to them: The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) knows how to run a tightly organized, high quality show. I’ve covered a multitude of beats during my 30 years as a journalist, which means that I’ve covered countless trade shows, devoted to almost every conceivable industry and niche. From that long experience, I can credibly assert that IAOP’s “Outsourcing World Summit” this year is, simply put, a class act.
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Covering these shows can make a journalist feel like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day”, but the Summit this week is an exception. I just emerged from the Summit KickOff Luncheon, held near the hotel pool and ringed by the picturesque Santa Rosa mountain range. The food was superb; the conversation even better. As someone who has covered aerospace for many years, I was struck by the remarks at lunch of Natalia Khandros, regional manager, global engineering sourcing, Pratt & Whitney. Pratt & Whitney, of course, is a major aerospace engine manufacturer. “Outsourcing has become increasingly important in the aerospace sector, but aerospace really is underrepresented here at the Summit,” she said. “I wish there was more discussion of the extended supply chain for companies such as ours. Aerospace companies are increasingly spreading their operations to regions that stretch all around the globe.” To be sure, the aviation industry is in the throes of accelerating consolidation. Driving these mergers and acquisitions is the need to enhance operational efficiencies and reduce labor costs. (See my article on this topic, in the January issue of Globalization Today magazine.) Applicable to aviation — and all industries — were the keynote remarks made by Michael F. Corbett, chairman, IAOP. I sat in attendance and found his comments of relevance to virtually any company in any
industry. He discussed the results of a recent IAOP member survey. With those results as context, he emphasized the “hot button” issue of social responsibility. Corbett noted that all the overheated political rhetoric lately about how outsourcing exacerbates domestic unemployment might foster the notion that outsourcing’s negative reputation will ultimately overshadow its positive impact on business and society. However, he said, there’s nothing in the survey data to suggest that this is actually the case. Corbett said that 95% of customer respondents to the IAOP indicate that the political controversy and subsequent protectionist initiatives have exerted no negative impact on their organization’s actual outsourcing decisions. Twenty-two percent do say that they are more careful to avoid awareness of their company’s outsourcing activities, making the matter one of messaging and not reality. “What is happening is that outsourcing customers and providers are working even harder to make their programs socially responsible,” Corbett said. Put another way, outsourcing can help companies do well, by doing good. That’s an important point, because the term “outsourcing” is a pejorative in many quarters. It’s seen by its critics as a way for companies to cut costs, by relying on lowwage jobs in developing countries — at the expense of higher-paid workers in developed areas such as the United States and Europe. But that’s a glib and misleading simplification that doesn’t take into account the way in which outsourcing reinforces the generation of value-added jobs in advanced economies, while lifting the aspirations and living conditions of the world’s poor. “Over the years, outsourcing has gone through many forms. Today, we think outsourcing is a global platform for transformation and growth, driven by integrated teams of high-value professionals, using advanced management practices and processes,” Corbett told the crowd. I saw many heads nodding up and down, in affirmation. RESTORING CONFIDENCE AFTER THE MELTDOWN
The global economy was staring into an abyss in the fall of 2008, when Wall Street
TRADE SHOWS melted down and storied investment banking houses went belly up. The aftermath of this calamity — and the struggle to restore confidence in the interconnected global relationships that sustain outsourcing — was the topic of Laura Unger’s address this afternoon at the “2011 Outsourcing World Summit”, in Indian Wells, California. I sat in attendance and filed this blog dispatch from the audience. Laura Unger is the former Acting Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission and a Commentator for PBS’ Nightly Business Report. Her presentation was entitled: “The Global Financial Market & How to Restore Confidence in Financial Markets: The Decade of Change.” She discussed recent “reforms” enacted by Congress during the last tumultuous 10 years. “These new financial regulatory bills are huge and unwieldy and the problem is, you have disparate groups writing different parts of the legislation,” she said. Unger’s wide-ranging address covered the crisis of confidence that occurred after the technology bubble burst in 1999-2000; corporate America’s scandals (Enron, WorldCom, etc.) of 2001-2002; and the implosion of the financial markets, from 2007-2008. “The regulatory solution was insufficient and of little impact,” she said, noting that Congress reacted with passage of Sarbanes Oxley in 2002 and the Dodd Frank Wall Street and Regulatory Reform Act of 2010. “The result was to make Washington, DC the capital of power. These new regulations have shifted the eyes of business, to focus on legislative and regulatory processes, instead of business issues.” Indeed, outsourcing must occur on a global playing field of interconnected and sometimes opaque financial relationships. That’s why the “shadow banking system” that Unger alluded to in her remarks is of great relevance to outsourcing. The global shadow banking system is a web of financial entities comprised of nondepository banks — e.g., investment banks, structured investment vehicles, hedge funds, and money market funds, which greatly burgeoned in size and influence during the last decade. Because these “shadow” entities are non-depository, regulatory limits on them were historically more lax than those for the traditional banking system. Shadow
institutions don’t receive deposits like a depository bank, making them immune from the same federal and state laws. In turn, this looser government oversight led to excesses that precipitated the global financial meltdown and Great Recession of 2008-09, which was the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the eve of this financial calamity, the shadow financial network in the United States had grown to roughly the same size as the country’s traditional depository banking system. The equivalent of a “bank run” within the shadow banking system was the trigger for the Wall Street crash in the fall of 2008. Instability within the global banking system laid the foundation for the continuing subprime mortgage crisis. Shadow banking institutions usually serve as intermediaries between investors and borrowers, providing credit and capital for investors, institutional investors, and corporations, profiting either from fees or from the arbitrage in interest rates between what it pays the investor(s) and what it gets from the borrower. Before the market collapse in 2008, classic forms of shadow institutions such as investment banks borrowed from investors via short-term, liquid markets — typically commercial paper markets — which compelled them to frequently repay and borrow again from these investors. They used these short-term funds to invest in longer-term, less liquid assets that were
harder to sell. In most cases, the long-term, illiquid assets in which they invested where securitized mortgages that plummeted in value as housing prices precipitously dropped, turning these mortgage-backed securities into so-called “toxic assets”. When the housing market nosedived, resulting in waves of foreclosures, these shadow banking institutions couldn’t get sufficient funds to operate. Short-term “paper” was suddenly unavailable because they became credit risks; at the same time, they couldn’t get funds from their collapsing investments in mortgage-backed securities. Nor could they get money from internal cash, because they were over-leveraged. This “perfect storm” of financial woes precipitated the bankruptcy in 2008 of the once powerful investment banking firms, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the subsequent market panic, economic recession and global credit crunch. “The credit ratings agencies didn’t do their jobs,” observed Unger. Why does all this matter to outsourcing? As Congress seeks remedies to these imbalances, it increasingly entangles itself in the international relationships of corporations, serving as an impediment to the competitiveness and efficiency of outsourcing. All of these circumstances, she said, makes me “appreciate the good work of you consultants, who genuinely help companies” during trying times.
This year’s Summit was held in Indian Wells, California — adjacent Palm Springs — where the surrounding mountains and verdant golf courses created the perfect backdrop for networking.
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TRADE SHOWS Solutions, and Application Outsourcing ••Over 1,000 Accenture team members are deployed ••Services are provided in 27 languages ••More than 125,000 Unilever employees are being served in over 100 countries Ogg conveyed to the attentive crowd the following outsourcing tips for managing large-scale HR transformation: “The three keys are: Data quality, data quality, data quality,” he said. “Don’t sign up for a business case you can’t deliver. Get personally involved with each business leader till the ‘go-live’ date. Set the right expectations with the HR team from the beginning and keep some operational HR staff on the ground.”
The Renaissance Esmeralda Resort was the Summit’s venue for workshops, presentations, cocktail parties, luncheons, and networking sessions.
UNILEVER’S LEVERAGE
I just emerged from a fascinating presentation made by Sandy Ogg, former Chief HR Officer, Unilever. He addressed a packed auditorium of at least 300 people. I sat in the audience with my trusty MacBook computer in my lap, avidly typing away as he spoke. Entitled, “The Role of Outsourcing in Business Transformation”, Sandy’s presentation underscored the fact that outsourcing is increasingly ubiquitous in not only esoteric disciplines such as information technology but in commonplace consumer products as well. “One out of every two individuals on the planet use our consumer products, but we won’t be happy until it’s one out of every one,” Ogg said, to chuckles from the audience. Unilever, a UK-based corporate behemoth, has much to brag about. A leading manufacturer and marketer of packaged consumer goods around the glove, Unilever products are sold in more than 170 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, and Western Europe. Talk about Global Reach! The company’s portfolio of every day items encompasses an enormous range of categories, including dressings and spreads; ice cream and beverages; personal care; and home care. Unilever’s stable of brands includes 11
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household names that rack up more than $1 billion each annually, including Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Lipton tea, Knorr soups, Lux and Dove soaps, and Sure and Degree antiperspirants. The Greek mathematician Archimedes famously said: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Multibillion dollar giant Unilever moves the world – by using outsourcing as leverage. According to Ogg, here’s how Unilever leverages outsourcing: * Liberate Human Resources. “We’re able to consider what capability is really core, so as to better enable HR to focus on talent in the business, versus service operations,” he said. * Better Technology. “We obtain reliable and powerful HR data streams for informed business decision-making,” he said. * Standardization. “Outsourcing drives consistency, rigor and a single approach,” he said. Ogg also noted the following: ••Accenture was selected as Unilever’s primary global HR Outsourcing provider in July 2006 ••The Unilever deal leverages Accenture’s three-core BPO businesses: HR Services, Learning Services, Procurement
Also noteworthy is the fact that HP is engaged in a seven-year, $675 million deal to provide Unilever with outsourcing services to manage the consumer goods giant’s technology infrastructure in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Turkey and the Middle East. Under terms of the contact, HP provides Unilever with an infrastructure capable of adapting to changing business needs by “standardizing, virtualizing and optimizing” Unilever’s enterprise computing environment. HP also is charged with working with Unilever partners such as BT, Microsoft and SAP to enable reduced costs and tighter integration of new applications. HP operates as Unilever’s “single point of contact” for multiple geographic locations. Despite the highly technical aspects of outsourcing, Ogg emphasized that he always remains mindful of the human dimension of Unilever’s consumer products business. “A customer once old me: ‘My hair is the most important thing that I own. My hair is instrumental in my personal life and at my job. I can’t rely on inferior brands.’ Think about that statement.” It’s always important, he said, to remember the human dimensions to outsourcing and the very real human footprints that global companies leave behind. OUTSOURCING PROCESS
AS
A
“HOLISTIC”
The 2011 IAOP Awards Luncheon this afternoon was well-worth attending — not just because of the opportunity to network
TRADE SHOWS and schmooze with peers and colleagues, but also because the food was pretty darned good. Take it from me: I’m a veteran of the rubber chicken circuit. Typically at these events, the attendees are subjected to a lousy meal. Instead, the IAOP made sure that we were served fresh salmon, rice and vegetables. A pleasant surprise. Journalists never skip the chance to grab a free meal, often at their peril. I’ll never forget the food poisoning that I got a few years back, when I was covering a political conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. But I digress. The outsourcing professionals who received accolades at the luncheon are indeed a praiseworthy bunch. The “Outsourcing Hall of Fame Inductees” were William F. Concannon, president, Global Corporate Services, CB Richard Ellis; and Sandy Ogg, former chief, Human Resources Officer, Unilever. (See my previous blog posting, “Unilever’s Leverage”, to benefit from Sandy’s rare insights into outsourcing.) The IAOP Members of the Year were Bobby Varanasi, COP, Chairman and CEO, Matryzel Consulting; and Chris Long, COP, COO, StayWell Health Management. For more about this year’s awards, including a list of the 2011 Global Outsourcing 100 and the 2011 World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors, go to the IAOP web site: http://www.iaop.org. After the luncheon, I attended several educational sessions. One that I found particularly interesting was “Mastering the Outsourcing Contracting Process”, presented by Brad Peterson and Paul Roy, both partners at Mayer Brown LLP. Peterson and Roy reviewed results of a survey conducted for IAOP’s Contracting Process Chapter. Among the highlights that they cited, here are the ones that I think are the most significant: * A large majority do not have a formal program for periodically evaluating the performance of outsourcing deals against the original objective. However, all respondents agreed that it is essential to have a program to evaluate the success of deals. * The use of a formal RFP process and
“Outsourcing Hall of Fame Inductees” L-R: William F. Concannon, president, Global Corporate Services and Sandy Ogg, former chief, Human Resources Officer, Unilever.
of sourcing specialists are both increasing. * Competitive bidding is the dominant approach and is increasing. A large majority report that the following factors are critical to a successful outsourcing contract: * Accurate financial analysis and modeling * Internal alignment of the customer organization * Complete and accurate contract documents * Project leader dedicated to outsourcing project * Effective use of competition * Transferring knowledge to the governance team * Understanding outsourcing issues * About a third of outsourcing deals involve lawyers in each of the three early stages: planning, RFP development and reviewing RFP responses. * About half the respondents reported some overlap between governance teams for clients that had multiple deals. * A very large majority reported not having an outsourcing best practices guide for outsourcing deals (85%) and not having formal training programs for governance teams (95%). Peterson and Roy emphasized that it’s imperative to get the right people on the outsourcing team. They also said that an “outsourcing team leader” should be appointed who is respected within the organization and holds a genuine belief in the value of the project. This team leader should be evaluated and compensated
based on the value of the process and the success of the outsourcing project. They also noted that an outsourcing process can easily get bogged down in its own complexity; success requires a team that can and will make decisions quickly. They characterized outsourcing as “an attack on existing power structures” that requires a champion. To be sure, outsourcing is complex with interwoven business, technical, financial, and legal issues; a person or team must take responsibility for an integrated analysis. That’s why outsourcing must be viewed as a “holistic” enterprise that gets buy-in from all stakeholders. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Persinos, Editorial Director of Globalization Today Magazine
John Persinos is editorial director of Globalization Today magazine: john. persinos@globalizationtoday.com. To read his archived blog online, go to our magazine’s home page and click the Blog hyperlink: http://globalizationtoday.com
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Agile IT, Agile Business By Jimmy Harris and Stephen Nunn No doubt about it: cloud computing is hot these days. It’s hard to read a newspaper or magazine without seeing something about the topic. As big as it is, however, cloud computing is actually part of an even bigger story: the fundamental re-creation of the traditional enterprise operating model. A whole panoply of technologies, applications and architectures is creating a way to scale the IT function up or down immediately to meet the near-real-time needs of any large organization. Tap into only the service you need, when you need it, for as long as you need it. The result is a far more agile and cost-effective IT function.
Agile workplace Agile IT is also transforming the way business is done by making it easier for people to use the right computing or communications device to access the information they need, when they need it, and to collaborate more effectively with others both inside and outside the organization. The traditional way companies have thought about linking workers with information has generally been device-specific. Now, mobile applications available at app stores are revolutionizing how consumers use their mobile devices, and we can expect similar developments at the enterprise level.
But if such a model for delivering IT capabilities is as compelling as it sounds, why not extend it beyond IT and apply the same model to any combination of people, process and technology? Because the cloud is more than a new IT architecture. It’s actually a new business design as well—a new, more flexible operating platform.
Eventually, CIOs will be able to think about an entirely different IT model: provisioning services by linking multiple providers and applications in a reconfigurable, end-toend manner to meet the ongoing needs of workers and the entire business.
The ultimate benefit and competitive advantage delivered through this new platform and design is greater organizational agility. An agile operating platform, enabled by outsourcing models and by an IT infrastructure that expands or contracts to meet demand, can help organizations be more responsive to the marketplace and create a more open environment for innovation.
The cloud model becomes even more compelling as one moves from hardware to software to processes and functions. In this third area affected by the cloud model, we find providers offering software or services that enable an entire function or workforce. Often called “software as a service,” this aspect of the cloud model begins to point to more radical changes in how businesses operate.
This newly enabled agility will transform business in several key areas:
Agile IT With traditional IT services, a company signs a multi-year contract for infrastructure support with an outsourcer or other provider. Once the ink is dry on the contract, those services are locked in for the specified period. With a cloud model, by contrast, IT services can be reconfigured quickly in support of new strategies and opportunities. When the needs of the enterprise change, a company isn’t saddled with irrelevant IT support or obsolete infrastructure. This kind of technology elasticity and scalability is fundamental to agility.
Agile processes
Cloud computing and software as a service present IT capabilities to companies on a pay-as-you-use basis. It’s an agile operating infrastructure that enables executives to make sourcing decisions in a rhythm that is more attuned to business cycles, rather than decisions that will result in a fixed condition over a period of many years.
Agile business But it is at the enterprise level where the use of the cloud model truly gets interesting. Here we find an enterprise operating platform that takes the app store approach to configuring IT capability and applies it to the business as a whole.
In this model, chief executives not only manage their organizations; they help design and redesign them too. They are managing, in fact, a virtual enterprise—an ecosystem of cloud providers, IT and business process outsourcers, and a host of other parties, both internal and external. We are some years away from this kind of enterprise operating model on a large scale, but the harbingers are already here. Consider “bundled outsourcing.” By having a single provider responsible for several related functions—human resources, finance, procurement, learning and so on—an organization gets the equivalent of the interoperability of technologies and processes at the enterprise level.
A new era The cloud model represents another stage in the relentless disaggregation of the business—breaking up the organization and its functions into logical components, keeping in house those that cannot be done more efficiently or effectively by an outside specialist, and letting someone else run everything else. This model requires new kinds of management styles, new ways of managing people and new ways of valuing the enterprise itself. Certainly these are significant challenges. But in a world where responsiveness and agility increasingly mark the difference between high performers and also-rans, agile IT and agile business will continue to be a distinctive feature of marketplace success. This article is based on “Agile IT: Reinventing the Enterprise” which originally appeared in the June 2010 issue of Outlook, an Accenture publication. Used with permission.
You can read the full article at: accenture.com/agileIT
© 2010 Accenture. All rights reserved.
Š2010 Accenture. All rights reserved.
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OPINION SURVEYS
Building a Better Outsourcing Community Two widely respected academics review the findings of the 2011 IAOP World Summit Survey By Mary Lacity and Joseph Rottman One mission of the IAOP is to build a better outsourcing community for customers, providers, and advisors. An important first step is to understand what each community expects from the other. We took that first step at the 2011 IAOP World Summit in Indian Wells, California by administering a survey to each community. The survey asked, “What is the one attitude or behavior you wish the other two communities would change in order to build a better outsourcing community?” Eightyone people provided 121 comments on the open-ended question. Thirty-one customers commented on providers and advisors, 31 providers commented on customers and advisors, and 19 advisors commented on customers and providers. We analyzed the content of survey and report on the most frequently cited responses from each community (see Table 1). Two very interesting patterns emerged. First, every community wants the other community to be more transparent. However, each community has a different
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view on what needs to be revealed. Second, the number one thing customers want from providers is innovation. But the provider and advisor communities said that many customers still treat outsourcing providers as vendors instead of strategic partners. We thus diagnose a significant disconnect—clients can’t drive deals on
price and then expect innovation. Below we explain in more detail what each community wants from each other. Once we better understand these all of these requests, each community can take the next step by committing to make reasonable changes that will benefit all parties.
Table 1: What Each Community Requests From Other Communities Requests to Customer Community Request from Customer Community
Request from Provider Community Request from Advisor Community
Requests to Provider Requests to Community Community 1. Innovation 2. Transparency 3. Better people management
1. Partners, not vendors 2. Transparency 3. Understand practices 1. Partners, not vendors 2. Realistic Expectations
Advisor
1. Tailored, not templated solutions 2. Provide more value 1. Transparency 2. Expand Provider Lists 3. Partners, not vendors
1. Transparency 2. Integrate sales and delivery teams 3. Understand advisors can help providers
OPINION SURVEYS
REQUESTS FROM CUSTOMERS TO PROVIDERS
The top three things customers want from providers are (1) innovation, (2) transparency and (3) better people management. “Where is the innovation?” Customers expect providers to proactively suggest innovations because outsourced work is core to a provider’s business, but not core to the customer’s business. Customers don’t want providers to wait for the customer to give them ideas. Customers expect to reap the benefits of a provider’s innovations in technologies and process maturity to constantly help customers achieve their business priorities. “Why is your cost structure a secret?” Customers want providers to be more transparent about their profit margins, cost structure, subcontracting practices, risk profile, and true attrition rates. Customers
also want to better understand how provider organizations allocate resources to staff client accounts. “Establish better alignment between your sales and delivery team.” Customers voiced two major concerns about providers’ allocation of human resources. The first concern was the lack of overlap between the sales team and the delivery team. Lack of continuity between provider teams can be problematic when the delivery team was not privy to the spirit of the discussions by the sales team that resulted in a particular contractual clause. The second concern was the quality of some of the provider’s employees. Customers said that some provider’s project managers lacked sufficient project management experience and that some offshore employees lacked process and domain understanding. Provider turnover is particularly painful for customers who may suffer the costs and consequences of the “flight of customer knowledge”.
REQUESTS FROM CUSTOMERS
PROVIDERS
TO
Providers requested that (1) customers treat providers like strategic partners rather than as vendors, (2) customers should be more transparent, and (3) customers should become better informed about outsourcing practices. “’It’s all about price’ is not a productive starting point.” We have heard for a long time that providers want to be treated like strategic partners, not vendors. The main complaint comes when procurement drives the deal, focusing almost exclusively on price. When procurement is the main driver of the decision, the customer invariably later asks “Where is the innovation?” Providers are best empowered to innovate when the dealmaking meaningfully involves client senior managers to define strategy, client process managers to identify operational complexities, and procurement to ensure
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OPINION SURVEYS
favorable financial outcomes. These three client stakeholders balance cost, service quality, and innovation objectives, offering a better opportunity for providers to deliver the financial and business benefits clients seek. “Customers need to be more open to front-end discovery.” Transparency is something providers and customers both want from each other. For providers, they want customers to be more transparent about their actual average baseline service levels—not their most optimistic guesses or their most favorable performance. Providers want customers to be more forthcoming about process complexity, process exceptions, and process volumes. Providers have a difficult time assessing these issues during due diligence, causing many surprises during the early months after transition. “We are not insurance agents; we cannot absorb all of your risk”. Providers voiced concern that inexperienced clients are often ill informed about outsourcing practices. Clients need to understand that provider contracts do not typically place all the risk on the provider. Survey respondents indicated that clients also need to understand local and international engagement practices and in particular that offshore outsourcing is complex. Clients need to be better informed about ROI and business goals for sourcing. REQUESTS ADVISORS
FROM
CUSTOMERS
TO
Customers requested two things from advisors: (1) tailored solutions and (2) and provide more value. “Listen to our question before launching into a prepared response.” Customers request that advisors listen more carefully to what the customers want instead of driving the process by using their existing methodology and templates. A number of
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GlobalizationToday March 2011
customers said that advisors have “strong egos” and presume to know what is best for the client and how to get it without understanding what the client’s real issues are in the operational world. “Don’t try to kill the goose that laid the golden egg to get all the eggs out in one go.” A number of customers mentioned the overall value of advisors relative to costs. A customer wrote, “We’re smart too. We’ve been around the block a few times. Bring more value to the relationship.” Customers who have used advisors requested: “Don’t charge us a dollar for every piece of advice.” Some customers said they need advisors but cannot afford the expense. REQUESTS FROM CUSTOMERS
ADVISORS
TO
Advisors requested two things from clients: (1) approach outsourcing more strategically and (2) have realistic expectations. “I wish customers were better at moving away from cost arbitrage to value-added relationships.” Advisors, like providers, wish that customers would approach outsourcing more strategically. As one advisor wrote, “price is not the only thing that matters.” In order to do this, advisors, like providers, wish that customers would have more business representatives and senior executives involved the process. “Clients want it all and take a Sherman’s march to the sea approach to contract negotiations.” Advisors wish that clients were more realistic in their expectations. The customer should not expect that providers can solve all their problems. Providers cannot do everything— excessively cut prices, radically speed delivery, and massively innovate all at the same time. If customers demand too much, they will break the provider’s business model to the detriment of the customer.
REQUESTS ADVISORS
FROM
PROVIDERS
TO
Providers requested that advisors (1) be more transparent during the process, (2) expand the list of potential providers that are recommended to clients, and (3) help clients and providers build a relationship, not a contract, by focusing on strategic partnerships. “Be more open to true sharing of customer communication from start to finish.” Providers want advisors to be more transparent during the entire decision process. They want to know if client senior executives truly support the outsourcing program. They want to know the client’s outsourcing objectives—do they really want to keep the incumbent provider or are they serious about switching providers? They want advisors to help customers provide realistic information, to disclose more information, and to provide more specific requirements. Providers want honest, face-to-face, detailed feedback when they are not chosen. “Don’t just recommend the usual suspects.” A number of small providers wrote that the top advisory firms do not consider how they might bring value to an outsourcing deal. Providers request that advisors take the time to understand what smaller providers can actually provide, rather than making broad assumptions. From an IT perspective, providers ask that advisors be more knowledgeable about hosting and cloud computing providers. Finally, domestic providers claimed that advisors immediately push clients to offshore providers. “Relationships are not based on templates.” Providers want advisors to be less rigid and less evangelical about their template-driven processes. Instead, providers want advisors to help their clients build strategic relationships by working towards value and less towards lowering
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DIAGNOSING Â AND Â TREATING Â UNHEALTHY Â OUTSOURCING Â RELATIONSHIPS By Sara Enlow and Joseph Bubman
Here’s  how  to  serve  as  your  own  outsourcing  physician. You can’t fix a problem in your outsourcing engagement before you know a problem exists. Missed milestones, a red dashboard, and significant turnover might be good indicators that something is wrong, but must you endure those costly consequences of underperformance? Not if you’re able to proactively determine early on whether there are areas of dissatisfaction that need to be addressed. Effective remediation, therefore, requires the ability to spot potential problems on the horizon. Assessing the health of your relationship helps you do just that. A  MECHANISM  FOR  SPOTTING  ISSUES
Make a systematic effort to assess the health of your engagement regularly. In addition to looking at price for services (as in a traditional benchmark) and delivery to contract terms, consider undertaking a “health check� approach to evaluate the performance, direction, and overall effectiveness of the engagement in areas such as communication, decision-making, metrics, and stakeholder alignment (see Table 1 for a suggested list of dimensions and hypotheses to test). Taking a broad view will help you get a sense of the extent to which the engagement is on track and meeting the expectations of both parties. The decision to assess the engagement should not, in itself, be an indication of underperformance. In fact, your healthiest outsourcing relationship can benefit from regularly occurring health checks in which your organization and your partner evaluate the arrangement and make appropriate adjustments based on the results. Recurring assessments enable you and your partner to conduct trend analyses and determine how the parties are doing over time in ensuring key success factors are in place — before something is obviously wrong. Consider making health check data accessible to stakeholders through executive dashboards, from which users can view the relationship status. THE  EARLIER,  THE  BETTER
If you’re about to launch a new engagement, consider putting in place a process at the outset that will enable you to spot issues quickly. At the outset of any new deal, be sure to: t Discuss what a healthy relationship would look like—what are the behaviors you would need to see to believe both parties are doing what is needed to make the relationship a success?
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GlobalizationToday   March 2011
t Develop a list of factors that are critical for the success of the engagement (e.g., things like managing scope effectively, making joint decisions efficiently, measuring what matters to the two organizations given their business objectives) t Decide when and how to assess the extent to which these success factors are in place (i.e., how you will go about conducting your health checks) t Agree on a structure for discussing findings and deciding what changes to make as a result Relationship Dimension
Questions to Answer
Communication
t %P XF TIBSF SFMFWBOU EFWFMPQNFOUT JO PVS JOEVTUSZ PS PVS CVTJOFTT BOE EJTDVTT XIBU JNQBDU UIFZ NJHIU IBWF PO TFSWJDF EFMJWFSZ t %P XF TIBSF JOGPSNBUJPO UIF PUIFS QBSUZ OFFET UP CF TVDDFTTGVM t %P XF JEFOUJGZ BOE EJTDVTT PQQPSUVOJUJFT UP FYQBOE UIF SFMBUJPOTIJQ
Continuous improvement and innovation
t %P XF IBWF B TIBSFE EFĂśOJUJPO BOE VOEFSTUBOEJOH PG DPOUJOVPVT JNQSPWFNFOU BOE JOOPWBUJPO BOE DPNNPO FYQFDUBUJPOT GPS XIBU TIPVME CF BDIJFWFE JO UIJT SFMBUJPOTIJQ t %P XF IBWF B TIBSFE VOEFSTUBOEJOH PG XIBU WBMVF IBT CFFO BDIJFWFE BOE XIFSF BEEJUJPOBM WBMVF DBO CF HFOFSBUFE
Decision-making
t "SF UIF SJHIU QFPQMF BEFRVBUFMZ DPOTVMUFE CFGPSF EFDJTJPOT BSF NBEF t "SF UIF PSHBOJ[BUJPOT JOUFSOBM EFDJTJPO NBLJOH QSPDFTTFT XFMM VOEFSTUPPE t *T UIFSF DPNNJUNFOU BOE GPMMPX UISPVHI XIFO EFDJTJPOT BSF NBEF
Governance structure
t *T UIF DVSSFOU NPEFM XFMM TVJUFE UP UIF QVSQPTFT PG UIF EFBM t "SF LFZ MFBEFSTIJQ SPMFT VOEFSTUPPE BOE ÜMMFE t "SF DPNNJUUFFT GVODUJPOJOH FòFDUJWFMZ
Metrics
t "SF XF NFBTVSJOH XIBU NBUUFST t %P PVS NFUSJDT QSPWJEF SFBTPOBCMF HVJEBODF PO IPX UP BMMPDBUF SFTPVSDFT t *T PVS SFQPSUJOH FóDJFOU BOE FòFDUJWF t "SF BEFRVBUF JODFOUJWFT JO QMBDF UP NPUJWBUF DPMMBCPSBUJWF CFIBWJPS BOE FòFDUJWF QFSGPSNBODF
Mindset and trust
t %P XF WJFX TFSWJDF EFMJWFSZ QFSTPOOFM BT QBSU PG B TIBSFE EFMJWFSZ UFBN XJUI DPNNPO DVTUPNFST t %P XF BDDFQU KPJOU DPOUSJCVUJPO GPS QSPCMFNT SBUIFS UIBO GPDVTJOH POMZ PO XIP JT BU GBVMU t %P XF USVTU PVS DPVOUFSQBSUT UP NFFU UIFJS DPNNJUNFOUT FòFDUJWFMZ
Processes and tools
t "SF UIFSF FòFDUJWF QSPDFTTFT UP NBOBHF EBZ UP EBZ DIBMMFOHFT F H JTTVF SFTPMVUJPO GPSFDBTUJOH OFX TFSWJDF SFRVFTUT
t "SF UIFSF UPPMT PS NFUIPET UIBU TVQQPSU KPJOU QSPCMFN TPMWJOH BOE DPMMBCPSBUJWF JTTVF SFTPMVUJPO
Skills
t "SF SFMFWBOU TVCKFDU NBUUFS DPNQFUFODJFT JO QMBDF t %P XF IBWF FòFDUJWF QSPKFDU NBOBHFNFOU t %P UIPTF PO UIF GSPOU MJOF DPMMBCPSBUF BOE SFTPMWF JTTVFT FòFDUJWFMZ
Stakeholder engagement and alignment
t %P XF IBWF B TJNJMBS VOEFSTUBOEJOH PG UIF PCKFDUJWFT PG UIF SFMBUJPOTIJQ t "SF FOE VTFST OFFET CFJOH NFU %P UIFZ IBWF BO PQQPSUVOJUZ UP QSPWJEF DPOTUSVDUJWF GFFECBDL PO UIF FòFDUJWFOFTT PG TFSWJDF EFMJWFSZ t %PFT TFOJPS NBOBHFNFOU VOEFSTUBOE JUT MFBEFSTIJQ SPMF BOE BDU DPOTJTUFOUMZ XJUI JU t "SF UIF SPMFT BOE SFTQPOTJCJMJUJFT PG SFMBUJPOTIJQ NBOBHFST DMFBS
OPINION SURVEYS
prices and shifting risks. Providers also need access to client senior managers if they are to build good partnerships. REQUESTS PROVIDERS
FROM
ADVISORS
TO
“What are you really investing in?” Advisors want providers to be more transparent about their capabilities and investments. Advisors want providers to tell them much more about their innovation activities and to explain what they are doing that is new and how they differentiate themselves from competitors. They want providers to do more planned advisory outreach. “Better integrate deal makers with implementers.” Advisors requested that providers have more overlap between the dealmakers—the sales team, contract negotiation team, and lawyers—and the implementers—the provider delivery team, service assurance team, and account managers. Advisors know providers do this so that the animosities that arise from tough negotiations do not spoil the relationship. Advisors wish providers had a better appreciation of the continuing role of deal making during the relationship; providers need to continually win the business throughout the entire relationship. “We can help you.” Advisors want more providers to consider hiring advisors to help them find customers, sharpen value propositions, accelerate business development, and open new geographical regions.
FOSTERING STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP
What can each community do to create a better outsourcing community? A number of suggestions emerge from the survey. It is quite clear, for example, that customers are more apt to get the innovation they want if they approach outsourcing providers as strategic partners rather than as vendors. To achieve this, customers need to include more actively client executives and business process owners in the decision process, instead of letting procurement lead the process. Granted, it is not easy to convince the client’s e-suite to get actively involved in the outsourcing of non-core capabilities, but the benefit to customers might be the innovation, process improvements, and the better technologies they seek. Each community wants the other communities to be more transparent. However—each community wants to peek inside the other community without necessarily reciprocating. More transparency will only occur if revelations benefit the revealing party. One can certainly argue that if clients are more transparent about their internal processes, service levels, and resources, they will benefit by getting more realistic bids. It is more difficult to argue that providers will benefit if they reveal their profit margins and cost structures. For publicly held firms, overall provider profitability is available, but specific client account data is not. Providers should, however, reveal to clients if they are seriously missing their margins, as our research shows that client satisfaction significantly drops when providers fail to meet margins. Within the provider organization, top performers do not want to be assigned to “a dog account”
and the account manager has trouble convincing the provider organization to allocate significant resources to a losing account. Helping clients understand this may make them more sympathetic to renegotiating since better provider margins equate to better customer service. At next year’s IAOP world summit, we hope to take the next step by asking the question, “What is the one attitude or behavior you can change to build a better outsourcing community?” RESOURCE BOX
Mary Lacity Mary Lacity is Professor of Information Systems at the University of Missouri-St. Louis: Mary.Lacity@umsl.edu
Joseph Rottman Joseph Rottman is Director of the International Business Institute and Associate Professor of Information Systems at the University of Missouri St. Louis: Rottman@umsl.edu.
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MANAGEMENT ADVICE
PAYING FOR THE HEALTH CHECK
When a health check process is initiated at the outset of an engagement, it’s easy to agree to share the cost. If your organization initiates a health check midcourse, you can either agree at the start of the process to share the cost or cover the upfront cost and ask the partner to help pay for implementing the recommendations. Regardless of who initiates and who pays for the health check, it’s often useful to establish a joint buyer-provider core team to ensure the health check satisfies the interests of both organizations.
Buyer Perspective “The provider’s delivery team denies knowledge of commitments made by the negotiation team.”
Buyers and providers overwhelmingly cite relationship management-related issues as the reason for underperformance of their outsourcing arrangements. Approximately half of respondents in a recent Vantage Partners survey on remediation in outsourcing relationships said communication difficulties (51%) and ineffective governance structures (47%) posed at least fairly significant challenges in their outsourcing engagement. When diagnosing challenges, you and your partner may quickly find that you have very different pictures of what is going on. While some “facts” may be indisputable, perspectives of those facts often differ. Do the following examples sound familiar?
The Facts
Provider Perspective
Despite a lengthy selection “The buyer did not provide process, contracting was hurried accurate baselines or clear and then a new set of players requirements.” rushed in.
“They are nickel and diming us on In the first three months of the “The buyer’s PMO team is everything and our savings are deal, the buyer is paying additional inexperienced, and they do not evaporating.” charges it did not anticipate. know how to properly interpret the contract.” “The contract is too long and There is disagreement between confusing — it is difficult to tell buyer and provider over what is actually in scope.” interpretation of contract terms.
“Transition is being delayed because the buyer wants to reopen the smallest details of the contract that were already agreed on in negotiations.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Bubman is a senior consultant at Vantage Partners, LLC, and a member of the firm’s Outsourcing practice. He has helped leading companies across a range of industries to negotiate and manage their strategic relationships more effectively. He can be contacted at jbubman@vantagepartners.com Sara Enlow is a Principal with Vantage Partners, and co-lead of the firm’s Outsourcing practice. Sara works with buyers and providers across a range of industries to help them get greater value from their relationships. She has written and published several articles, studies, and white papers on negotiation and relationship managementrelated topics, and is a frequent speaker at major outsourcing conferences and events. She can be reached at senlow@vantagepartners.com.
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GlobalizationToday March 2011
Rather than arguing about these conclusions, share your reasoning path by explaining the data you see and how you interpret it to reach your conclusions. Inquire into their reasoning path by asking what data they see and how they interpret it to reach their conclusions. It is likely that, somewhere along the way, you and your partner can begin to build a shared picture of what is happening. Getting to the bottom of these challenges requires a focus on joint contribution — setting aside who is to blame and focusing on building an understanding of how each side has contributed. That’s not to say that the question of who is at fault should never be addressed. Although both parties may have contributed to a problem, it may be that only one party has legal responsibility or contractual accountability for it. But those are separate questions from “How do we fix it?” and “How do we avoid repeating it?”
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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
PROJECT MANAGEMENT: AN ART OR A SKILL? By Leanne Cullen
Is project management an art or a skill? Is it something that you can learn or is it more intrinsic than that – more deep-rooted in someone’s behavioural traits? Leanne Cullen, a consultant at Watersons, tries to answer the question, drawing from her own experiences. PROJECT MANAGEMENT AS A SKILL
There are many, ever improving, project management methodologies which are defined to enable structure and to ensure the consistency of management, communication, escalation and progress monitoring within and across projects. PRINCE 2 is one widely recognised, process-based method for effective project management, written to be generic so that it can be used to manage projects across many disciplines and industries. Such a process-based method can be taught and therefore, with the required level of intellectual capacity, can be learnt as a project management skill - it gives you the appropriate processes, tools and techniques to deliver projects. It provides the structure to manage a project in a logical, organised way – with defined steps and provides a common language with the necessary controls and breakpoints to work successfully. Understanding and working within a project management methodology, such as PRINCE 2, is a valuable skill. PROJECT MANAGEMENT AS AN ART
Project management as an art is linked to social intelligence. Social intelligence requires firstly a basic understanding of people and secondly the ability to interact successfully with them. Project management is about managing people who are delivering the tasks on a project and therefore a successful project manager will: • Have the presence to ensure that they appear confident and are respected by their team and customers. • Have the clarity to communicate and explain concepts clearly, to be persuasive and encourage co-operation. • Have the awareness to understand the social contexts that are influencing behaviours and have the ability to read situations and take actions based on that awareness. • Be honest, open and demonstrate integrity and fairness at all times. • Have empathy with the team and the customer and have the ability to see situations from their perspective. People management is a vital part of project management and the ability to manage and interact with people can prove to be critical to a projects’ success. Project management as an art is not only about people management, there are certain behavioural traits that are inherent qualities that make some individuals more successful as project managers – these are often referred to as ‘soft skills’ and include:
• Having the ability to foster strong, trusting and productive relationships; • the ability to plan and organise; • excellent self-awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses; • the ability to persuade and negotiate; • strong tenacity and determination; • the capacity to anticipate and think ahead; • assertiveness and confidence; • the ability to be decisive and make informed decisions; • strong results-oriented leadership; • the quality of being able to motivate and inspire people; • attention to detail; • the ability to use ingenuity to overcome obstacles; • having the ability to challenge. These are just the softer skills that spring to mind – there are more! As you can see, these are not necessarily qualities that can be taught; they may be qualities that can be gained through experience or through specific mentoring, but each are personal qualities that an individual just has to have. CONCLUSION
As a project manager myself, I feel project management is both an art and a skill - to be an excellent project manager you can’t have one without the other. Without understanding the project management methodology your project would become unstructured, lack control and be inconsistent. And without having the relevant behavioural traits projects would be managed mechanically following predefined steps without the necessary social intelligence and inherent qualities being applied. A good project manager needs to be both highly knowledgeable regarding the management processes and be equipped with excellent people skills. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leanne Cullen joined Waterstons as a consultant focussing on application development utilising Microsoft technologies. After an initial period as a developer, Leanne’s focus moved to project management of bespoke software development projects and systems analysis/design. As well as continuing the project management work, Leanne now manages the business applications group; a team of consultants who develop unique, bespoke solutions using Microsoft technologies including ASP.Net, SQL Server and SharePoint.
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MANAGEMENT ADVICE
DIAGNOSING AND TREATING UNHEALTHY OUTSOURCING RELATIONSHIPS By Sara Enlow and Jospeph Bubman
Here’s how to serve as your own outsourcing physician.
Relationship Dimension
Questions to Answer
You can’t fix a problem in your outsourcing engagement before you know a problem exists. Missed milestones, a red dashboard, and significant turnover might be good indicators that something is wrong, but must you endure those costly consequences of underperformance? Not if you’re able to proactively determine early on whether there are areas of dissatisfaction that need to be addressed. Effective remediation, therefore, requires the ability to spot potential problems on the horizon. Assessing the health of your relationship helps you do just that.
Communication
• Do we share relevant developments in our industry or our business and discuss what impact they might have on service delivery? • Do we share information the other party needs to be successful? • Do we identify and discuss opportunities to expand the relationship?
Continuous improvement and innovation
• Do we have a shared definition and understanding of continuous improvement and innovation and common expectations for what should be achieved in this relationship? • Do we have a shared understanding of what value has been achieved and where additional value can be generated?
Decision-making
• Are the right people adequately consulted before decisions are made? • Are the organizations’ internal decision-making processes wellunderstood? • Is there commitment and follow-through when decisions are made?
A MECHANISM FOR SPOTTING ISSUES
Make a systematic effort to assess the health of your engagement regularly. In addition to looking at price for services (as in a traditional benchmark) and delivery to contract terms, consider undertaking a “health check” approach to evaluate the performance, direction, and overall effectiveness of the engagement in areas such as communication, decision-making, metrics, and stakeholder alignment (see Table 1 for a suggested list of dimensions and hypotheses to test). Taking a broad view will help you get a sense of the extent to which the engagement is on track and meeting the expectations of both parties. The decision to assess the engagement should not, in itself, be an indication of underperformance. In fact, your healthiest outsourcing relationship can benefit from regularly occurring health checks in which your organization and your partner evaluate the arrangement and make appropriate adjustments based on the results. Recurring assessments enable you and your partner to conduct trend analyses and determine how the parties are doing over time in ensuring key success factors are in place — before something is obviously wrong. Consider making health check data accessible to stakeholders through executive dashboards, from which users can view the relationship status. THE EARLIER, THE BETTER
If you’re about to launch a new engagement, consider putting in place a process at the outset that will enable you to spot issues quickly. At the outset of any new deal, be sure to: • Discuss what a healthy relationship would look like—what are the behaviors you would need to see to believe both parties are doing what is needed to make the relationship a success?
34
• Develop a list of factors that are critical for the success of the engagement (e.g., things like managing scope effectively, making joint decisions efficiently, measuring what matters to the two organizations given their business objectives) • Decide when and how to assess the extent to which these success factors are in place (i.e., how you will go about conducting your health checks) • Agree on a structure for discussing findings and deciding what changes to make as a result
GlobalizationToday March 2011
Governance structure
• Is the current model well-suited to the purposes of the deal? • Are key leadership roles understood and filled? • Are committees functioning effectively?
Metrics
• Are we measuring what matters? • Do our metrics provide reasonable guidance on how to allocate resources? • Is our reporting efficient and effective? • Are adequate incentives in place to motivate collaborative behavior and effective performance?
Mindset and trust
• Do we view service delivery personnel as part of a shared delivery team with common customers? • Do we accept joint contribution for problems, rather than focusing only on who is at fault? • Do we trust our counterparts to meet their commitments effectively?
Processes and tools
• Are there effective processes to manage day-to-day challenges (e.g., issue resolution, forecasting, new service requests)? • Are there tools or methods that support joint problem-solving and collaborative issue resolution?
Skills
• Are relevant subject matter competencies in place? • Do we have effective project management? • Do those on the front line collaborate and resolve issues effectively?
Stakeholder engagement and alignment
• Do we have a similar understanding of the objectives of the relationship? • Are end users’ needs being met? Do they have an opportunity to provide constructive feedback on the effectiveness of service delivery? • Does senior management understand its leadership role and act consistently with it? • Are the roles and responsibilities of relationship managers clear?
MANAGEMENT ADVICE GATHER DATA TO PINPOINT PROBLEMS
Whatever you call the process you undertake (e.g., relationship audit, health check, engagement assessment), dig for data that will help you spot potential problems and then diagnose what’s happening. A health check doesn’t have to be a lengthy, expensive endeavor—there are many ways to collect data on the relationship: interviews, survey, joint working sessions, and review of contracts, performance reports, and governance data. The intensity of the data collection process should take into account the scope and complexity of the engagement (see Table 2). Even when adopting a “light touch” approach, be sure to 1) collect input from stakeholders involved in different aspects of the arrangement, and 2) move beyond individuals’ perspectives by reviewing contracts, performance reports, and governance data to better understand service delivery objectives and execution. As part of the data collection and analysis effort, it may be useful to enlist the help of an independent party to avoid the appearance that one party is collecting data that supports only its view. In later sections of this playbook, we’ll offer some guidance on how to review and analyze the data to identify the key issues that require attention, diagnose the root causes of those problems, and develop recommendations for addressing them. DIG BENEATH SYMPTOMS
Once you’re armed with data about the relationship, diagnose the causes of any challenges the parties are experiencing. While quality problems, missed deadlines, and scope overruns may appear to be the result of your provider misrepresenting its capabilities or understaffing the work, or your customer baselining improperly or turning over a function that was a mess from the start, these challenges often have their roots in the way the relationship is managed. Certainly there are providers who can’t do all they think (or say) they can, and there are buyers whose functions are out of control. But underperforming outsourcing arrangements often have more complex problems at their core. And most of the time, both sides have contributed to lackluster results and relationships. Our experience suggests that there are a handful of areas where some common, but often less obvious, causes of underperformance arise. Consider the table on the right:
Health checks can be conducted more or less intensely, with implications for how the data is collected.
Light Touch
(most appropriate for relationships of little complexity and/or small annual contract value)
Medium Strength Heavy Duty (most appropriate for relationships of moderate complexity with medium-sized annual contract value)
(most appropriate for highly complex relationships with significant annual contract value)
Survey: to validate interview findings or independently assess what is working well and what needs improvement Review of contracts, performance reports, and governance data: to understand objectives, expectations and perceived commitments around service delivery Interviews: to assess strengths and weaknesses and help diagnose key challenges Joint working session: to diagnose key challenges
Relationship Dimension
Questions to Answer
Communication
Parties do not actively raise and explore questions and concerns, and/or are unwilling or unable to share information about what is important to their organization
Continuous improvement and innovation
The parties lack a shared definition of innovation or “value add,” and have different expectations about who should play what role in generating innovation
Decision-making
It is unclear who should make key decisions, who should be consulted before decisions are made, and who should be informed about decision outcomes
Governance structure
Governing bodies and individuals are not in place, are poorly designed, or are not functioning as intended
Metrics
Metrics used to manage the relationship do not provide an adequate or accurate picture of performance, and/or do not guide effective allocation of resources
Mindset and trust
The parties do not have a shared view of the type of relationship required to meet their business objectives, and therefore have different expectations about appropriate behavior Processes necessary for the relationship to function on an everyday level (e.g.,
Processes and tools invoicing and payment, request of new services, scope changes, issue resolution) are not in place or are ineffective, or individuals lack the tools to carry out such
Skills Stakeholder engagement and alignment
Stakeholders are not equipped with the joint problem-solving skills required to resolve disputes on the merits while maintaining a strong and collaborative working relationship Stakeholders are not supportive of the outsourcing strategy and/or have different views about objectives and/or expectations
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MANAGEMENT ADVICE
PAYING FOR THE HEALTH CHECK
When a health check process is initiated at the outset of an engagement, it’s easy to agree to share the cost. If your organization initiates a health check midcourse, you can either agree at the start of the process to share the cost or cover the upfront cost and ask the partner to help pay for implementing the recommendations. Regardless of who initiates and who pays for the health check, it’s often useful to establish a joint buyer-provider core team to ensure the health check satisfies the interests of both organizations.
Buyer Perspective “The provider’s delivery team denies knowledge of commitments made by the negotiation team.”
Buyers and providers overwhelmingly cite relationship management-related issues as the reason for underperformance of their outsourcing arrangements. Approximately half of respondents in a recent Vantage Partners survey on remediation in outsourcing relationships said communication difficulties (51%) and ineffective governance structures (47%) posed at least fairly significant challenges in their outsourcing engagement. When diagnosing challenges, you and your partner may quickly find that you have very different pictures of what is going on. While some “facts” may be indisputable, perspectives of those facts often differ. Do the following examples sound familiar?
The Facts
Provider Perspective
Despite a lengthy selection “The buyer did not provide process, contracting was hurried accurate baselines or clear and then a new set of players requirements.” rushed in.
“They are nickel and diming us on In the first three months of the “The buyer’s PMO team is everything and our savings are deal, the buyer is paying additional inexperienced, and they do not evaporating.” charges it did not anticipate. know how to properly interpret the contract.” “The contract is too long and There is disagreement between confusing — it is difficult to tell buyer and provider over what is actually in scope.” interpretation of contract terms.
“Transition is being delayed because the buyer wants to reopen the smallest details of the contract that were already agreed on in negotiations.”
Rather than arguing about these conclusions, share your reasoning path by explaining the data you see and how you interpret it to reach your conclusions. Inquire into their reasoning path by asking what data they see and how they interpret it to reach their conclusions. It is likely that, somewhere along the way, you and your partner can begin to build a shared picture of what is happening. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Getting to the bottom of these challenges requires a focus on joint Joseph Bubman is a senior consultant at contribution — setting aside who is to blame and focusing on building Vantage Partners, LLC, and a member of the an understanding of how each side has contributed. That’s not to say firm’s Outsourcing practice. He has helped that the question of who is at fault should never be addressed. Although leading companies across a range of industries both parties may have contributed to a problem, it may be that only one to negotiate and manage their strategic party has legal responsibility or contractual accountability for it. But relationships more effectively. He can be those are separate questions from “How do we fix it?” and “How do we contacted at jbubman@vantagepartners.com avoid repeating it?”
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SOCIAL ISSUES
THE CSR FACTOR By Ron Babin and Bill Hefley
Does Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) play a role in your outsourcing decisions? Of course! Here’s why. Microsourcing takes place when buyers “pass the baton” of paid services, small As befits its role as a professional association, IAOP constantly monitors key developments in global outsourcing. Accordingly, for the last four years, the IAOP ’s Advocacy and Outreach Committee has operated a subcommittee focused on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). What is CSR? The new international standard providing guidance on CSR, ISO 26000, addresses human rights, labor practices, the environment, fair operating practices, consumer issues, community involvement and development, as well as the organization’s governance of its activities in these areas. The CSR subcommittee within IAOP has taken steps to understand and shape the role of CSR in outsourcing. During outsourcing’s infancy, CSR was neither understood nor embraced by outsourcing providers or buyers. This is changing. The mandate of the CSR subcommittee is as follows: The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sub-committee is chartered with identifying and promoting discussion among IAOP members on how outsourcing can be used as a powerful tool for advancing critical social, economic, and environmental issues on a global basis. Additionally, it examines corporate socially responsible policies and practices for outsourcing, including identifying and showcasing policies that our membership have adopted, creating a framework for companies to model new CSR policies, and developing a network of resources for members At the 2011 Outsourcing World Summit, IAOP Chair Michael Corbett asked approximately 700 delegates to respond to a real-time poll: “Is CSR a factor in your outsourcing decision?” The answer from 80% of respondents was, to varying degrees, Yes (specifically, Always, Frequently, Sometimes):
Prior to the Summit, IAOP conducted an e-mail survey of its 110,000 members, and the results were almost identical, with 79% responding with Yes (Always, Frequently, Sometimes), with a similar distribution. The survey was conducted in late 2010. Contrast these 2011 results with the CSR subcommittee’s 2009 survey. Approximately 170 IAOP members took part in this survey. These results
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were reviewed at the 2010 IAOP Outsourcing World Summit and at the 2009 IAOP European Outsourcing Summit. The 2009 survey found that only 62% of outsourcing customers reported making CSR a factor in their outsourcing decisions:
Without a doubt, there is today a strong adoption of CSR in outsourcing. In particular, respondents who answered “Always” almost quadrupled, from 8% to 31% in just the past two years. In anticipation of this seachange, the CSR subcommittee has been working to develop a CSR Guide for the outsourcing industry. The guide, which should be available later in 2011, relies on global standards such as ISO 26000, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project, and will provide guidance for the outsourcing community. Contributions to the Guide come from industry practitioners, academic researchers, and expert advisors. The subcommittee is chaired by Michael Corbett (IAOP), Scott Philips (Accenture) serves as Special Advisor to the subcommittee, and contributing members include Bill Hefley (ITSqc and the University of Pittsburgh), Ron Babin (Ryerson University), Jorge Muxica (Applied Materials) and many others. The subcommittee is coordinated by Pam O’Dell (IAOP). If you’re interested in assisting IAOP in its CSR efforts — for example, if you’d like to contribute a white paper or case study—please contact IAOP head Michael Corbett: michael.corbett@globalizationtoday.com Without a doubt, there is today a strong adoption of CSR in outsourcing. In particular, respondents who answered “Always” almost quadrupled, from 8% to 31% in just the past two years. In anticipation of this seachange, the CSR subcommittee has been working to develop a CSR Guide for the outsourcing industry. The guide, which should be available later in 2011, relies on global standards such as ISO 26000, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project, and will provide guidance for the outsourcing community. Contributions to the Guide come from industry practitioners, academic researchers, and expert advisors. The subcommittee is chaired by Michael Corbett (IAOP), Scott Philips (Accenture) serves as Special Advisor to the subcommittee, and contributing members include Bill Hefley (ITSqc and the University of Pittsburgh), Ron Babin (Ryerson University), Jorge Muxica (Applied Materials) and many others. The subcommittee is coordinated by Pam O’Dell (IAOP). If you’re interested in assisting IAOP in its CSR efforts — for example, if you’d like to contribute a white paper or case study—please contact IAOP head Michael Corbett: michael.corbett@globalizationtoday.com Without a doubt, there is today a strong adoption of CSR in outsourcing. In particular, respondents who answered “Always” almost quadrupled, from 8% to 31% in just the past two years.
SOCIAL ISSUES In anticipation of this seachange, the CSR subcommittee has been working to develop a CSR Guide for the outsourcing industry. The guide, which should be available later in 2011, relies on global standards such as ISO 26000, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project, and will provide guidance for the outsourcing community. Contributions to the Guide come from industry practitioners, academic researchers, and expert advisors. The subcommittee is chaired by Michael Corbett (IAOP), Scott Philips (Accenture) serves as Special Advisor to the subcommittee, and contributing members include Bill Hefley (ITSqc and the University of Pittsburgh), Ron Babin (Ryerson University), Jorge Muxica (Applied Materials) and many others. The subcommittee is coordinated by Pam O’Dell (IAOP). If you’re interested in assisting IAOP in its CSR efforts — for example, if you’d like to contribute a white paper or case study—please contact IAOP head Michael Corbett: michael.corbett@globalizationtoday.com Without a doubt, there is today a strong adoption of CSR in outsourcing. In particular, respondents who answered “Always” almost quadrupled, from 8% to 31% in just the past two years. In anticipation of this seachange, the CSR subcommittee has been working to develop a CSR Guide for the outsourcing industry. The guide, which should be available later in 2011, relies on global standards such as ISO 26000, the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project, and will provide guidance for the outsourcing community. Contributions to the Guide come from industry practitioners, academic researchers, and expert advisors. The subcommittee is chaired by Michael Corbett (IAOP), Scott Philips (Accenture) serves as Special Advisor to the subcommittee, and contributing members include Bill Hefley (ITSqc and the University of Pittsburgh), Ron Babin (Ryerson University), Jorge Muxica (Applied Materials) and many others. The subcommittee is coordinated by Pam O’Dell (IAOP). If you’re interested in assisting IAOP in its CSR efforts — for example, if you’d like to contribute a white paper or case study—please contact IAOP head Michael Corbett: michael.corbett@globalizationtoday.com EXCERPT FROM THE FORTHCOMING IAOP CSR GUIDE
CSR and sustainability continue to grow as important business issues. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has tabulated the number of corporate reports on CSR/sustainability since 1999. Figure 1 below depicts the exponential growth in these reports, from nine in 1999 to 1390 in 2009. This data provides a surrogate that represents the growing global interest and importance that organizations place on CSR and sustainability. CSR is a concept that overlaps with business ethics, corporate philosophy, corporate citizenship, sustainability and environmental responsibility. A recent Boston Consulting Group report describes the CSR concerns of senior managers who “consider the economic, social and even political impacts of sustainability-related changes in the business landscape.” The report states that “Sustainability will become increasingly important to business strategy” and recognizing this, “companies will need to collaborate across internal and external boundaries.” CSR has been defined over several decades of research and practice. Archie Carroll describes the four-level Pyramid of CSR as having a foundation of economic responsibility (deliver products and services in a profitable manner). The second level is legal responsibility to society. The top two pyramid levels of ethical and philanthropic responsibilities
are seen as voluntary activities of an organization to live up to the expectations of society. Socially Responsible Outsourcing (SRO) is defined as an outsourcing model that “operates strategically to yield social benefits in addition to its traditional commercial revenues,” according to Jeremy Hockenstein, CEO of Digital Divide Data (DDD). Typically, an SRO firm will be located in a marginalized region and will employ people from a disadvantaged population, for example uneducated women in India or Africa. SRO is a specific application of CSR in outsourcing. The concept of SRO is closely related to the use of Information and communications technologies (ICT) for developing nations, sometimes referred to as ICT4D. As well, rural-sourcing, where outsource providers locate delivery centers in rural North America, is a form of SRO. It is difficult to imagine that some outsource providers would not yet embrace sustainability as an organizational program and market requirement. We fully expect that early stage outsource providers will begin to report within the GRI format, moving beyond corporate sustainability brochures, and will entertain preliminary CDP evaluations. As well, now that ISO26000 is finalized, many leading firms will embrace that standard as a formalization of their early sustainability actions. Perhaps in time the ISO26000 standard will become as important to the industry as CMM and standards on quality and security such as ISO9000 and BS5750. This standard will require early stage providers to establish a formal sustainability program and protocol within the organization, moving beyond a marketing and communication approach. Our advice to buyers and providers of outsourcing services is to evaluate and adopt CSR and sustainability standards such as Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), the UN Global Compact and ISO26000. Leading outsourcing providers have already done this, often with the encouragement of their customers and employees. Ron Babin is Associate Director and Assistant Professor at Ted Rogers School of IT Management, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. He can be reached at rbabin@ ryerson.ca
Bill Hefley, Ph.D., COP, is a clinical associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh. At Pitt, he is also associated with the Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership, the International Business Center, the Asian Studies Center, and the Center for Latin American Studies. At Pitt Business, Bill teaches in the MBA, MS MIS, and undergraduate programs, and directs the global supply chain certificate. He is a frequent lecturer on service science education, service innovation, and global services and software delivery. Dr. Hefley is a Director of ITSqc, LLC, and author of the eSourcing Capability Models. He serves on IAOP’s CSR Subcommittee and is the Chairperson of the Training and Certification Committee, and is a member of the US TAG to ISO 26000.
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WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAOP WELCOME NEW IAOP MEMBERS
CLIMB THE SUMMIT!
IAOP is pleased to welcome new and renewing corporate and professional members from: Accenture; Aditya Birla Minacs; ADV; Ahilia; Allstate Financial; Ameriprise Financial; API Outsourcing; Apple; Artel CIMTEC Inc.; Bancolombia; Bank of Canada; Belcan Corporation; BeyondCore; Biz Plus; Blue Shield of CA; Booz Allen Hamilton; Brasscom; Bronte Advisors; CA Technologies; Cassidy Turley; CB Richard Ellis; CDI; CIGNA; Cisco; Colliers International; Compass America; Co-operative Financial Services; Covidien; CSC; CustomerServ, LTD; Data Control Group Inc.; Deloitte; Discover Financial Services; E per-se International Inc.; EAI Information Systems; Entergy Services, Inc; EquaTerra; Estee Lauder; Experian; Ferrovie dello Stato; Firstsource; Freedom Communications, Inc.; Freescale Semiconductor; General Motors; Genpact; Germany Trade & Invest; GijimaAst; HBC; HR Access; IBM Corporation; Infosys; Intel Corporation; Intuit; JANUS Associates; Kelly Services; Kirkland & Ellis LLP; Kraft Foods; LiveOps, Inc.; LivIT; Long View Systems; MainstreamBPO; ManageChina; Meridian Global Services; Metlife; Michigan State University; Microsoft; Morgan Stanley; Mphasis; Nagarro Inc.; NetApp; Nike Inc.; North Fork Holdings; Northern Trust Company; Oce Business Services; Onshore Technolgy Services; Oracle; Orange Business Services; PA Consulting; Patni Americas, Inc.; PPG Industries; Prudential; PUC - Pontificia Univ. Catolica MG - BRA; PwC; RDI; Regis University; Resolutionary; Rio Tinto; RT Enterprises of NY; RTM Consulting; Rutgers Business School; Sapienza Consulting; Sears Holdings; Shanghai Hyron; Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton; Sloan Soluions; Softtek; Sprint; StayWell Health Management; Steinbeis University; StrataFusion; Suncorp; Sunway Shared Services Centre; SupportSave; Sutherland Global Services; Targecept; TATA Communications; TEAM International; TeleTech; The Beryl Companies; The Shelby Group; Thomson Reuters; TPI; TransUnion Interactive; TwinBizz BV; UBS AG; USDA/OCIO/ITS; VARtek Services Inc.; Wellpoint; Wells Fargo; WNS; Work at Home Vintage Employees; Xchanging; and Zurich Financial Services. For information on IAOP membership, e-mail sales@iaop.org.
AWARD PROGRAMS
IAOP’S OUTSOURCING AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED
Outsourcing Hall of Fame Two leaders who have left their mark on the outsourcing industry and society through their work were inducted into the Outsourcing Hall of Fame. The latest inductees into the prestigious hall are William F. Concannon, president, global corporate services at CB Richard Ellis Group, Inc.; and Sandy Ogg, former chief human resource officer at Unilever. The pair was honored at a luncheon ceremony attended by hundreds of outsourcing professionals during the International
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WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAOP
MEMBERSHIP Membership in IAOP provides access to an extensive array of services, and just as importantly distinguishes organizations and professionals as leaders in the field of outsourcing. IAOP membership demonstrates a commitment to innovative thinking, continuous performance improvement, and to the sustaining development of outsourcing as both an industry and as a profession. CUSTOMER CORPORATE MEMBERSHIP Organizations that are currently outsourcing or are considering one or more outsourcing initiatives should become Customer Corporate Members of IAOP. This membership provides organization-wide access to the association’s research, training, certification, and networking programs - all designed to help companies achieve better business results through outsourcing. PROVIDER/ADVISOR CORPORATE MEMBERSHIP Outsourcing service providers and advisory firms should join IAOP as Provider/Advisor Corporate Members. This membership provides the same organization-wide access to IAOP’s research, training, certification, and networking programs as Customer Corporate Membership, but also includes member-only sponsorship opportunities that serve the marketing and business development needs of these companies. PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIP Professional Membership is available to individuals either as part of their company’s corporate membership or on an individual basis. This membership serves the needs of practitioners working in the field of outsourcing whether as customers, providers, or advisors. In addition, it provides these professionals with direct, personal access to association services. Special Offer! Sign up by March 31, 2011 and save $75 on Professional Membership. To sign up, go to www.IAOP.org/PMregistration and use the offer code ‘IAOP-PM-NEW11’. For information on IAOP membership, e-mail sales@iaop.org. Association of Outsourcing Professionals®’ (IAOP®) 2011 annual conference, The Outsourcing World Summit®. “The Outsourcing Hall of Fame exemplifies the positive impact outsourcing has on business and society,” said IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett. “We are proud to induct the newest members into this hall and recognize them for their outstanding work and many contributions to the industry and world around us.” Global Excellence in Outsourcing (GEO) Microsoft Corp. and Bancolombia Group are the first organizations with teams to win the Global Excellence in Outsourcing (GEO) award. Microsoft’s Finance & Procurement Global BPO team has been awarded the new honor for innovation. Bancolombia Group’s Outsourcing Strategy Management Department Unit is the recipient of the GEO in the best practices category. Members of the Year The two long-time corporate members were honored at a luncheon ceremony attended by hundreds for their demonstrated commitment to the growth of IAOP and their leadership in the promotion and delivery of the association’s programs. IAOP recognized Chris Long, chief operating officer of StayWell Health and Management, and Bobby Varanasi, chairman and chief executive officer of Matryzel Consulting, Inc. as “Members of the Year” for their work to advance the outsourcing industry.
MEMBER SERVICES
IAOP membership provides access to a wide range of services designed to help you and your organization improve outsourcing outcomes. Many of these services are included as part of IAOP’s Professional or Corporate Membership, with discounts available for use beyond the level provided. Some services are also available individually at non-member rates. • Globalization Today - The official publication of IAOP creates the largest and best informational publication on outsourcing by uniting and tapping the collective intellect of individuals from around the world. IAOP Members receive a free subscription plus the opportunity to get published, promote products/services and advertise. • IAOP’s Knowledge Center, Firmbuilder.com® - This online repository houses more than 600 articles, including chapter meeting presentations, conference proceedings, industry whitepapers, research articles and more. • Chapter Network - Through its active and expansive chapter network, IAOP members can share their expertise and find knowledge on best practices for specific industry segments, topics and geographic areas within outsourcing. • Conferences & Events - IAOP hosts the world’s best-known and most highlyrespected executive conferences on the topic of outsourcing. • Certified Outsourcing Specialist Family of Certifications - Receive 50 complimentary COS tests each year. • Value Health Check Survey - This web-based diagnostic tool provides outsourcing customers and service providers with rapid insights to realizing outsourcing value. • BestOutsourcingJobs.com - Companies seeking the best talent for outsourcing jobs, as well as professionals looking for employment opportunities, can benefit from this IAOP member service provided through BestOutsourcingJobs.com. For more detailed information, visit www.IAOP.org/MemberServices. CALENDAR OF EVENTS
IAOP CHAPTER MEETINGS IAOP chapters provide a forum for members to collectively focus on professional development, networking, and the advancement of outsourcing within specific areas of common interest. Each chapter is led by chairs and co-chairs with deep knowledge in the area covered. IAOP members are members of the association, and not of a specific chapter, and are encouraged to participate in as many chapter meetings as they wish. Non-members are welcomed to attend any chapter meeting as IAOP’s guest to learn more about the association and its work. •
MAR 17
GLOBAL HUMAN CAPITAL CHAPTER WEBINAR ON “NEARSHORING: CAPITALIZING ON THE EXPANSION OF SERVICES DELIVERY IN THE AMERICAS”
•
MAR 22
LEQAL PROCESS OUTSOURCING CHAPTER WEBINAR ON “WHY AND HOW LAW DEPARTMENTS SHOULD RATIONALIZE AND MANAGE LEGAL SPEND”
•
MAR 23
LIFE SCIENCES CHAPTER MEETING ON “IAOP’S NEW FRONTIER: THE DRUG DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY”
•
MAR 24
PUNE CHAPTER INAUGURAL MEETING, MIKE CORBETT TO DELIVER KEYNOTE
•
MAR 30
BANGALORE CHAPTER MEETING ON “”EVOLVING CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONAL APPROACH TO SOURCING AND “ECOSYSTEM BASED SOURCING MODELS”
FEB 13
NORDIC CHAPTER MEETING ON “WHAT CAN AND CAN’T BE OUTSOURCED”
FEB 19
MIDWEST CHAPTER MEETING ON “OBTAINING VENTURE CAPITAL FOR MIDWEST ITO AND BPO ENTREPRENEURS”
APR 21
CHICAGO CHAPTER MEETING
APR 26
TRANSBOUNDARY SOURCING CHAPTER WEBINAR ON “SOURCING FROM AFRICA – OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES”
To join and view a full listing of our current chapters, go to www.IAOP.org/Chapters.
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WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAOP
The Global Outsourcing 100 and World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors The 2011 Global Outsourcing 100 provider and advisory companies were announced at the recent 2011 Outsourcing World Summit in Indian Wells, California. Rankings for the top 100 provider and top 20 advisor positions will be revealed in a special advertising section on outsourcing in the May 23 Fortune 500 issue (on sale May 9) that is released in North America. For the first time, IAOP and Fortune are publishing a July 2011 China edition of the Global Outsourcing 100 special section in Manderin Chinese, offering increased promotion and visibility for the lists globally. For complete details on the 2011 Global Outsourcing 100, the top companies (listed alphabetically) and details about how to participate in the special Fortune sections detailed above, please go to http://www.iaop.org/Content/19/165/1793/Default.aspx. CONFERENCES & EVENTS THE 2011 LATIN AMERICAN OUTSOURCING SUMMIT May 26-27, 2011 | Las Americas Global Resort and Convention Center, Cartagena, Colombia
The 2011 IAOP Latin American Outsourcing Summit is a first-of-itskind global event bringing the thought-leadership and global network of IAOP together with leaders from across the Latin American business community. The result is an exceptional opportunity for individuals and organizations involved in outsourcing as customers, providers, and advisors to both understand and leverage the explosion of outsourcing taking place across the region. Whether you think of Latin America as an outsourcing destination, as a market for your company’s services, or as the region you call home, this is a not to be missed global business gathering. Organizations such as Accenture; Bancolombia; Baker & McKenzie; Booz & Company; Brasscom; Capgemini; CB Richard Ellis; Colliers International; Colombia’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism; The Economist; Ecopetrol; HSBC; InvestChile (CORFO); ITSqc; Johnson & Johnson; Kirkland & Ellis; Matryzel Consulting; Nearshore Americas; neoGroup; PwC; SABMiller; Softtek; Teleperformance; Zona Franca Bogota; and many others are already slated to participate. The newly elected president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, has committed the support of his office and, schedule permitting, expects to personally participate and address delegates. In addition to main session keynotes, three in-depth tracks allow delegates to build an event that fits their particular needs and interests. • Track One features real-life customer experiences — giving delegates the chance to learn firsthand from the experiences of customer organizations across the globe. • Track Two focuses on how we benefit from outsourcing — geared toward those individuals charged with making outsourcing work for their organizations, the track will delve into the challenges of doing multi-country outsourcing deals, opportunities in global
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outsourcing and developing globally-competitive talent. • Track Three will explore the future of outsourcing in Latin America with sessions designed to dig deeper into the various countries, what’s happening there today, and most importantly, what the experts expect to happen over the next 24 to 36 months. Early Bird Pricing: Register at www.IAOP.org/LATAM by March 14 to receive the early bird rates of $350 IAOP member/$375 non-member. For information on sponsoring and exhibiting, please contact Renee Preston at renee.preston@iaop.org. THE 2012 OUTSOURCING WORLD SUMMIT® February 20-22, 2012 | Disney’s Contemporary Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida
Register now at www.IAOP.org and get introductory pricing PLUS a $25 resort gift card! IAOP® presents the 15th edition of its world-renowned conference - The Outsourcing World Summit - on February 20-22, 2012 at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Every year, hundreds of outsourcing executives from across the industry and around the world who are seeking the very latest insights and ideas attend the Summit. Educational sessions deliver specific actionable solutions to current challenges faced by experienced professionals. Case studies feature actual experiences and the lessons learned, and discuss new ideas, approaches and opportunities. The Outsourcing World Summit has become the event that executives attend each and every year to stay informed of the latest developments affecting the outsourcing industry and their profession. Hurry! Introductory pricing won’t last long – Register today. CERTIFICATION & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT COP MASTER CLASS SCHEDULE
The COP Master Class is a great option for reaching up to half (75 points) of the Knowledge and Training points needed for certification, or for COPs to earn 20 recertification CEHs, or to fully complete the required training for the aCOP designation. IAOP is actively registering now for the following classes: • MARCH 24-27, 2011: KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA • JUNE 20-23, 2011: KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA • JUNE 27-30, 2011: KINGBRIDGE CONFERENCE CENTRE, TORONTO, CANADA • SEPTEMBER 19-22: INVERNESS HOTEL & CONFERENCE CENTER, DENVER, CO • OCTOBER 19-21, 2011: HARBOUR PLAZA METROPOLIS, HONG KONG • NOVEMBER 21-24, 2011: KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA
Please visit www.iaop.org/training_calendar for a full list of classes and current discounts and specials.
WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAOP CORPORATE & PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ALLIANCE PARTNER SPECIAL FROM VAN HAREN!
Now you can take advantage of this limited time special (March only!) for a free download of the OPBOK Templates (a $14.95 value) from IAOP’s Corporate & Professional Development Alliance Partner - Van Haren Publishing! Please visit this link for your free templates! Free Template Offer Click Here! CORPORATE PROGRAMS
IAOP’s private master class calendar is filling up with Corporate Companies taking advantage of educating their employees inhouse! With the dramatic cost savings, there is no better time than now to use up your training budget. Host an in-house class for between 10 and 25 employees, partners and customers and save on time and travel. Classroom training will be delivered by an IAOP Authorized Trainer at your facility with each student who successfully completes the COP Master Class provided with a Certificate of Completion noting that they have earned 75 points toward the COP designation and fulfilled the aCOP training requirement. Leading firms like Accenture, Allstate, American Express, Ameriprise, Applied Materials, Avasant, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Capgemini, Capital One, CB Richard Ellis, Colliers, Convergys, Deutsche Bank, Diebold, Firstsource Solutions, Fuji Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Heineken Netherlands, Infosys, ISS, John Hancock, Johnson & Johnson, Kirkland & Ellis, Kraft, Liberty Mutual, Long View Systems, Manulife, MDeC, NCR, Nike, Orange Business Services, Pfizer, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Procter & Gamble, Quint Wellington Redwood, Rogers Communications, SAB Miller, Oracle, Symantec, Unisys, US Department of Labor, VADS Berhad, Vodafone, Whirlpool, Wipro, Xerox, and Zurich Financial Services have embraced IAOP’s training and certification programs as a key element in their organiztion’s program for exceptional outsourcing outcomes. Executives interested in bringing the COP program division- or company-wide are invited to contact your account executive or email sales@iaop.org. IAOP INTRODUCES DESIGNATION
CERTIFICATIONS
ENABLED
(ICE)
To serve the entire Outsourcing Ecosystem and increase synergies between outsourcing service provider, customer and advisory companies and certifications within the OPCF, IAOP has introduced the IAOP Certifications Enabled (ICE) designation. The ICE designation would enable leading outsourcing service provider, customer and advisory companies to highlight their adoption of international best practices in hiring their workforce by endorsing IAOP certifications. This designation can help differentiate participating companies in the marketplace, and help promote awareness of the certification programs and encourage adoption across the industry. Please visit http://www.iaop.org/ Content/23/193/3116 to find out how your company can get ICE designated or contact Pam O’Dell at pam.odell@iaop.org.
IAOP ANNOUNCES ENDORSEMENT OF ESCM CAPABILITY DETERMINATIONS AS IAOP’S ORGANIZATIONAL CERTIFICATION
The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) and ITSqc are pleased to announce IAOP’s support for eSCM-based organizational certification and the endorsement of the eSCM models by the Outsourcing Standards Board. The announcement was made at the IAOP’s 2011 Outsourcing World Summit in California. This is an important recognition of the power and usefulness of the eSourcing Capability Models to guide improvement and provide for assessment and certification of both client organizations (using the eSCM-CL) and of service providers (using the eSCM-SP). The eSCM Models and their relationships to the IAOP’s Outsourcing Body of Knowledge (OPBOK) are documented in the eSCM books, which are available from VanHaren and other booksellers, such as Amazon. For more details, read the announcement at www.itsqc.org/ about/news/story20110221.html NEW TRAINING COURSES ADDED TO THE OUTSOURCING PROFESSIONAL COURSE CATALOG (OPCC)
As of March 1, 2011 IAOP has added two additional courses to the OPCC. Both courses will qualify to earn COP designation and COP recertification points. The courses are: • University of St. Louis-Missouri course on “Management of Global Sourcing of Business and IT Services” • University of Tennessee course on “Vested Outsourcing To find out more about these courses and see what other offerings are available you can visit the course catalog here. If you are interested in adding a course or training to our Outsourcing Professional Course catalog, please contact copprogramservices@iaop.org. NEWSWIRE ADVANCED OUTSOURCING CERTIFICATION IN RESOURCES TO BE OFFERED BY IAOP AND HROA
HUMAN
Professionals working in Human Resources outsourcing can validate their expertise with a new advanced professional certification being developed jointly by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals® (IAOP®) and HROA. Announced at IAOP’s 14th annual Outsourcing World Summit® here, the new Certified Outsourcing Professional®-HR designation will enable individuals who are outsourcing customers, providers or advisers to demonstrate their HR outsourcing expertise. “The COP designation has become globally recognized as the industry’s de facto standard of excellence since IAOP introduced it in 2006,” said IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett. “We are pleased to join with HROA to offer this specialized certification for HR professionals.”
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WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAOP
Said HROA Chairwoman LeAnne Andersen of Best Buy: “The HROA is committed to improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of HR outsourcing. A certification program that builds the necessary skills is a huge advantage for any HR professional embarking on a serious HR outsourcing program. Having participated in IAOP’s COP program, I can attest to its value.” To obtain the COP-HR certification, professionals must first obtain IAOP’s COP designation. Individuals also will have to pass a COP-HR exam and meet re-certification requirements. IAOP will develop the COP-HR standards, application, exam and certification/re-certification requirements while HROA will develop the supplementary course material and case studies. The associations will create a core set of HR outsourcing-related course materials and case studies for the Outsourcing Body of Knowledge (OPBOK-HR) that will be delivered to professionals seeking the certification in a live workshop format. An online workshop format also will be explored. Under the agreement, HROA members will receive discounts on the COP application, exam, classes, workshops and materials. The COP-HR certification is the newest in a group of expanded certification programs launched by IAOP under the Outsourcing Professional Certification Framework™ (OPCF) with a full range of certifications for individuals at every career level. IAOP also offers a Certified Outsourcing Specialist-Human Resources (COS-HR) designation for entry-level positions. MICROSOFT CORPORATION AND BANCOLOMBIA GROUP TEAMS WIN FIRST GLOBAL EXCELLENCE IN OUTSOURCING (GEO) AWARDS FROM IAOP
Microsoft Corp. and Bancolombia Group are the first organizations with teams to win the Global Excellence in Outsourcing (GEO) award from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals® (IAOP®). Microsoft’s Finance & Procurement Global BPO team has been awarded the new honor for innovation. Bancolombia Group’s Outsourcing Strategy Management Department Unit is the recipient of the GEO in the best practices category. Both teams were honored at a luncheon ceremony attended by hundreds of outsourcing professionals during IAOP’s 2011 annual conference, The Outsourcing World Summit®. IAOP started the award program to distinguish outsourcing professional teams at customer organizations who have advanced the field’s best practices, created innovative solutions and delivered great results for their companies. “As outsourcing increasingly becomes a strategic, corporate-wide program it’s more and more often teams of outsourcing professionals who are creating the results their companies need,” said IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett. “We salute the GEO winners on their accomplishments that raise the bar for all of us.” One-Stop Controller’s Shop Microsoft won in the innovation category for developing a new tool called “Controller Workspace,” a portal that uses Microsoft SharePoint technology to increase the efficiency of Microsoft’s
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finance staff and enable them to focus on value-added activities. The solution integrates internal and outsourced activities into a seamless one-stop shop for everything the controller needs to do the job. This includes providing clear, up-to the-minute data on regulatory compliance and status of the monthly close; the ability to assign tasks; and manage profit and loss approvals, Sarbanes Oxley compliance and audit issues. Team members winning the award include: Alan Byrne, director, finance operations, service delivery lead – Europe, Americas; Srini Krishna, director, finance operations, global vendor management; Henric Häggquist, senior director of finance operations global BPO management; and Rod Winters, general manager, finance operations. Model Outsourcing Bank Colombia’s largest bank, Bancolombia, uses outsourcing services in numerous departments, including treasury and international trade, tax processing, payments, network auditing, operational processing, bank security, real estate, logistics and mortgages, involving about 6,000 employees. The result was the development of the “Bancolombia Outsourcing Model,” which engages executives from across the organization in a consistent, highly-effective process for identifying, evaluating and agreeing to new outsourcing initiatives. “This model has been a consistent method for implementing, operating and evaluating outsourcing relationships, which is directly aligned with methods for managing and evaluating business processes,” said Luisa F. Toro, manager. Bancolombia Group was recognized for its national and regional benchmarking in the financial sector and other sectors that it has shared with business advisors and consultants. The company also trains members of its Strategy Outsourcing Management Department with its best practices and measures the organizational climate through a best practice study “Great Place to Work” every two years. The members honored with the GEO were: Natalia Gil, initiatives analyst; Diego A. Giraldo, ITO analyst; Maria C. Alzate, governance analyst; Catalina Lopera, BPO analyst; Ma Isabel Orozco, department auxiliary I; Luis F. Arias, department auxiliary I; and Toro. Case studies from both companies are available at www.IAOP.org. CLOUD-BASED OUTSOURCING SOLUTIONS ON THE RISE, IAOP SURVEY SHOWS ORGANIZATIONS EXPAND OUTSOURCING TO INCREASE FLEXIBILITY
Driven by the need for flexibility and speed, organizations will increasingly implement cloud-based outsourcing solutions in the coming year, according to results from a global membership survey of the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’ (IAOP). IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett shared findings from the association’s annual member survey, based on inputs from its more than 110,000 members and affiliates worldwide, during his keynote remarks to open The Outsourcing World Summit®. Current social and economic trends, new outsourcing approaches, internal teams of skilled professionals and the continued development
WHAT’S HAPPENING AT THE IAOP
of outsourcing as a management discipline all are positive for the industry’s future, he said. “We stand on the threshold of the Golden Age of Outsourcing,” Corbett said. “The components are all in place for 2011 to be the year that outsourcing becomes a truly global platform for real business transformation and sustainable growth.” New Outsourcing Platform Emerging Released today, the survey conducted with the support of Accenture found that two-thirds of outsourcing customers have or will implement cloud, or Internet-based, computing solutions. Respondents said they plan to use cloud-based outsourcing solutions to manage customer relationships, human resources, finances and documents; process transactions and deliver other administrative services. “Cloud-based outsourcing is emerging as one of the biggest changes underway in the outsourcing delivery model,” Corbett said. “Speed and flexibility are the biggest benefit customers see in these solutions.” The survey also found that outsourcing has expanded significantly as both a management practice and an industry over the past year and will continue its growth. Eighty percent of customers indicated their organizations plan to pursue more new outsourcing opportunities in 2011. As business conditions continue to improve, companies are increasing their use of outsourcing to meet new challenges deeper in their organizations and to deliver better outcomes. Clients are looking for outsourcing providers to bring industry expertise, analytics and innovation to the table, leading to better business insight and greater value creation, said Mike Salvino, group chief executive, BPO, at Accenture. Increasing business flexibility was a top reason for outsourcing given by 59 percent of the members participating in the survey as was achieving long- and short-term savings. Using outsourcing to support future business opportunities is more important now to 62 percent of respondents and accessing skills and talent is increasingly important to 40 percent. The survey also found that outsourcing is increasingly driven by internal teams of professionals. Respondents said the number of
outsourcing professionals working at their organizations grew by more than 40 percent with wages and compensation also going up in many organizations. “Outsourcing has itself become a recognized organizational competency,” he said. “Companies are beginning to make the necessary investments to build these skills across their organizations. This new breed of outsourcing professional is advancing management practices and processes that produce consistent, highquality outcomes. Another key finding is the continued push by outsourcing customers and providers to make their programs more socially responsible. The survey showed about 70 percent of members responding say that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important to critical part of their outsourcing programs. IAOP’S GLOBAL OUTSOURCING 100 SHOWS CONTINUED INDUSTRY GROWTH LIST OF 2011 WORLD’S BEST OUTSOURCING PROVIDERS AND ADVISORS UNVEILED
Outsourcing continued to grow throughout the economic crisis, according to data from the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals®’ (IAOP®) Global Outsourcing 100 ranking. Data supplied by outsourcing service providers participating in the annual listing showed the industry grew 10 percent in 2010, IAOP reported from its Outsourcing World Summit®. The association released the unranked lists of the world’s best outsourcing service providers and advisors at the 14th edition of its world-renowned conference. For the companies named to the list, go to www.iaop.org/Download/Default.aspx?ID=1535. The outsourcing service providers named to the sixth annual listing of the Global Outsourcing 100 includes companies from around the world providing the full spectrum of outsourcing services. The top consulting, legal and advisory firms also were named to IAOP’s third World’s Best Outsourcing Advisors list. “Outsourcing returned to a healthy 10 percent growth rate last year, showing its strength and resiliency as a management practice that organizations value through good and bad economic times,” said IAOP Chairman Michael Corbett who chaired the judges’ panel. Rankings of companies on both lists as well as sublists with industry and geographic data will be released in a special advertising supplement in FORTUNE® magazine in May.
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SCRAPBOOK
Snapshots from the Summit
olombia (GEO) - Microsoft Corp. and Banc Global Excellence in Outsourcing llence in Exce al Glob the s with teams to win Group are the first organization ent Global BPO urem Proc & nce Fina t’s osof Outsourcing (GEO) award. Micr bia Group’s honor for innovation. Bancolom team has been awarded the new is the recipient of the Unit ent artm Dep ent agem Outsourcing Strategy Man . GEO in the best practices category
Inducted into CB Richard Ellis President and Former Unilever HR Chief Fame of Hall Outsourcing rcing industry Two leaders who have left their mark on the outsou Unilever were and Ellis d Richar CB at work their h and society throug recently inducted into the Outsourcing Hall of Fame. William F. The latest inductees into the prestigious hall are CB Richard Ellis Concannon, president, global corporate services at ce officer at Group, Inc.; and Sandy Ogg, former chief human resour er. Unilev attended by The pair was honored at a luncheon ceremony 2011 annual IAOP’s during sionals profes rcing outsou of hundreds it®. Summ conference, The Outsourcing World e impact “The Outsourcing Hall of Fame exemplifies the positiv an Chairm IAOP said ” , outsourcing has on business and society into ers memb t newes the induct to proud are Michael Corbett. “We work and many this hall and recognize them for their outstanding ” us. around world and ry contributions to the indust ues to grow Established by IAOP in 2006, The Hall of Fame contin honor unique The ranks. its in ers globally and now has 20 memb s as well as ement achiev rcing outsou their for uals individ izes recogn pment and their contributions to community-based economic develo tion and educa , pment develo career ents, investm ted socially-direc training through outsourcing. For more information on The Outsourcing Hall of Fame,
visit www.IAOP.org.
Members of the Year - The two long-time corporate me mbers were honored at for their demonstrated commitment to the growth of IAOP and their leadership in the pro motion and deliver y of the association ’s programs. IAOP recognized Chris Long, chief operating officer of Stay Well Health and Management, and Bob by Varanasi, chairman and chief execut ive officer of Matryzel Consulting, Inc. as “Members of the Year” for their wor k to advance the outsourcing industr y.
Sandy Ogg
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o Concann William F.
Whether you think of Latin America as an outsourcing destination, as a market for your company’s services, or as the region you call home, this is a must attend global business gathering.
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Accenture www.accenture.com For information on speaking, sponsoring or attending, visit BCS www.bcs.org/opportunity Diebold www.diebold.com International Association of www.IAOP.org Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) International Medical Corps www.internationalmedicalcorps.org Kelly Outsourcing & Consulting Group www.kellyocg.com (KellyOCG) SENCOR www.sencor.net WNS Global Services www.wns.com
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