Outsourcing Center, Staff Writer
Taking the IT outsourcing plunge is nothing to take lightly. But what’s really holding you back? Often it’s fear of the unknown, along with fear of losing full control, that keeps you from experiencing the many benefits outsourcing can bring. But if you look around, you’ll likely see your competitors are doing it — and …
Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer
Please silence your smartphone and give this article your full attention. For most people these days, that’s easier said than done. Although the proliferation of mobility has untethered global employees from their desks, provided anytime access to the information they need to do their jobs, and given workforces newfound agility, there is a dark side. …
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Companies can use social media effectively to generate and spread ideas, to collaborate and communicate in real-time across the organization. In a world where the death of a butterfly in Mexico and rise of forest fires in Australia are connected, where opposing calamities like droughts and floods are the result of one cause, does it …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
The IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) model began as a way of provisioning IT services, infrastructure and support for businesses that did not really understand how to create or run IT services. The ITaaS model does this at scale in a cost-effective and predictable manner. Put another way, ITaaS is a pay-as-you-go model aimed at SMBs who want …
Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer
16th Annual Outsourcing Excellence Award Winner 2012—Best New Process/Application: Rio Tinto and Infosys Rio Tinto is a leading international mining group, and at almost 200,000 invoices a month, is one of the largest global accounts payable operations around. Until 2009, these payables were handled in house, by separate regional onshore teams in five different countries, …
Frank Usher, Managing Consultant
Renewing and renegotiating outsourcing relationships is a great learning experience about what can go wrong in a relationship. One prevalent characteristic is the informality of the provider/customer relationship in long-standing relationships. Contracts that have been in place seven-ten years often lapse into an informality that has the provider acting more as an internal IT department …
Outsourcing Center, Patti Putnicki, Business Writer
Can you even remember what it was like to have to be in a “place” to make a call? When a flat tire meant a search for a pay phone? When email was something that accumulated between Friday and Monday, until the office computer was powered back on? It’s hard to believe that when the …
Deborah Kops, Managing Principal, Sourcing Change
Most of us have been down on our knees praying that the relationship does not blow up over an error. Perhaps the cutover was delayed because the provider did not conduct sufficient user acceptance tests, or an employee committed fraud within a client account because controls were inadequate, or the client did not provide the …
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
The bulk of most companies’ operational costs are in manpower, says Ragu Bhargava, CEO of Global Upside, Inc., a finance and accounting (F&A) service provider. That’s one of the reasons companies in all industries are increasingly bucking the long-held practice of retaining full-time F&A staff in house. Mountain View, Calif,-based Global Upside, Inc. provides services …
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
There’s no shortage of methodologies and advisories on best practices and risk mitigation strategies for the transition phase of outsourcing relationships. Even so, many buyers encounter situations they didn’t foresee when structuring their arrangement, which cause costs to rise and delay time to value. Outsourcing Center studied these types of situations by surveying companies nominated …
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