The Horse’s Forecast for Outsourcing in 2010
While there is no way Phil Fersht, the leading BPO analyst-turned-vendor, is correct about England winning the 2010 World Cup, there is a good chance many of his other thoughts could come true in 2010. Read his predictions for the outsourcing industry here. There are over a dozen comments on analysis, so the conversation is indeed interesting. Right from the horse’s mouth, as one would say. Read More →
The Black Book of Outsourcing – Invaluable Resource or Red Herring?
How useful is Datamonitor's 2009 Black Book of Outsourcing Report? During this short week, I took the opportunity to take a hard look at the 2009 Black Book of Outsourcing, the source of innumerable vendor press releases touting so-called market leadership based on rankings provided by Brown and Wilson. In Scott Wilson’s own words, “The Black Book is known as the leading independent unbiased ranking of vendors as it surveys qualified users...
Pro-Globalism View of Outsourcing and Outsourcing Critics
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 We find ourselves in uncertain times caused by globalism and the talk of self-preservation. Where...
The Philippine Outsourcing Dilemma
The Philippines has been an outstanding outsourcing location over recent years. It has an American heritage with close proximity to Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. There is a reasonably robust telecommunications infrastructure and there has been extensive capital infusions from China and many other countries. For foreigners, travel and accommodations in the Philippines is easy. Probably the most impressive opportunity is the...
Insights on Procurement Outsourcing
A couple of weeks ago, Phil Fersht kicked off a firestorm of conversation with his Horses for Sources article on HR Outsourcing. We shared our opinion on the topic in our article debating the value of HR Outsourcing. Well, this week, Jason Busch published his opinion on procurement outsourcing on Spend Matters. Jason is one of the preeminent strategic sourcing, procurement, and spend management experts, and we encourage strategic sourcing and spend...
Human Resources Outsourcing: Where’s the Value?
We recently completed an analysis of the value a series of outsourcing programs had created for a very large company. That company had never truly baselined and tracked value outsourcing programs had created. So, the exercise was similar to a paleontology event trying to find the old bones. The client had created value through offshore labor arbitrage, but because senior executives didn’t enforce a “take it to the bottom-line”...
Definition of Vendor Management
Executives and outsourcing vendors alike are constantly evaluating what vendor management is. Here is our quick definition of vendor management: Vendor management is the discipline of establishing service, quality, cost, and satifaction goals and selecting and managing third party companies to consistently meet these goals. Read More →
Understanding What You Have Before You Outsource
The challenges facing corporate operation units are daunting. Driven by Wall Street expectations, CFO-led budget tightening activities never understand seasonal operational demands, backlogs caused by technology or marketing SNAFUs, or the competitive job marketplace causing 40% (or more) annual attrition. Deeper, broader budget cuts just exacerbate operational problems and somewhere, deep in the bowels of your operation units, something is likely...
