Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Five years ago the big industry buzz was about the role of analytics. The excitement it generated at the time matched the arrival of another hot new technology: the first iPhone (June 27, 2007 in case you forgot!) Did the reality match the hype? (Analytics not iPhone.) Today an analytics component has become table stakes …
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
The finance and accounting function, along with HR, have traditionally been the BPO processes that companies testing the waters of outsourcing get wet with first. Today “transactional outsourcing has been leveled to a simple commodity,” says Michael J. Alfonsi, Managing Director, BancTec Financial Transaction Services. So what are FAO’s challenges 20 years later? Processes are …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
Today’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not simple documents that define the duration and the service to be delivered against a timetable with a handful of pre-determined performance parameters. Rather, they are documents that include cleverly negotiated customization, additional provisions, provider and buyer obligations, reporting methodologies, penalties and rewards. A well-crafted and customized SLA document …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
One of the questions that continue to hound buyers and providers of outsourcing is how to mitigate the risk of failure. This is despite a longer history of outsourcing than you would suspect—outsourcing can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution. For 150 years, until 1900, industry in Europe outsourced its requirements. Functions like accounting …
Frank Usher, Managing Consultant
When considering sourcing alternatives for IT services, buyers must make a fundamental decision on structure. Do you want a single IT provider or multiple IT providers? Both have their pros and cons. Neither of the approaches is wrong. But each presents unique challenges, both in operations and in provider management. When IT outsourcing initially evolved, …
Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer
If you look back on the transforming world of IT over the past few years, it’s easy to chart the stages. First, there was denial that anything needed to change. Then came the fear of cloud and the perceived lack of control associated with this agile, new delivery model. As we move to 2013, we …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
The next big IT infrastructure trend is here: Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS). We’ve seen how data can deliver insights in the hands of people like Hans Rosling, who has been listed amongst the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Rosling has shown the history of 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 data …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
What’s new in the data center? Last year, the buzz was around “fabric data centers” as organizations began to worry about costs. Did it make sense to have dedicated and expensive network, computing and storage resources around applications even if the IT infrastructure was outsourced? Could IT infrastructure costs be brought down? CIOs were under …
Anand Chopra, Ph.D., Research & Analytics, Wipro BPO
Mobile networking. Online games. Social computing. As personal and professional worlds collide, social media is generating huge amounts of unstructured data that’s brimming with business insights — from consumer preferences to competitor activities. That’s why many companies are using social media monitoring tools to “listen” to these conversations. These automated tools — from firms such …
Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer
16th Annual Outsourcing Excellence Awards—Best BPO: International Paper and Aon Hewitt “Instead of communicating by change requests and contract management, we can sit down and talk. That is what makes us successful.” Scott Lacy, Manager of HR Operations, International Paper It was the 1990s and the paper and packaging industry was dramatically evolving. To keep …
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