Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
I’ve got a little story about cloud solutions. A wealthy looking woman entered an optician’s shop, pointed to a very stylish frame and declared to the shopkeeper, “I’d like to buy that. How much?” Gauging at a glance her capacity to pay, he replied: “$500.” When she didn’t bat an eyelid, he added quickly, “for …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
The digital age has changed customer DNA forever. They have no patience with 9 to 5 and they’re shredding the concept of after-hours and weekends. They have a voice, and that voice demands to be heard whenever, wherever. Enter outsourcing social media marketing. Working hours, what’s that? Banks—previously such strict observers of “working hours” all …
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Talk to most outsourcing buyers at the outset of their engagements and innovation is always on their wish list. Talk to them two or three years later, and the one thing they wish they had gotten is innovation. The lack of innovation in outsourcing seems to be one the few things they are unhappy about. …
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
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 …
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
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 …
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 …
Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer
What is outsourcing? It is not a new or alien phenomenon. Almost every organization outsources some aspect of its business. A paint company may outsource the manufacture of its paint cans; a mobile network may outsource its billing activity; a hospital may outsource medical waste disposal; an auto manufacturer may outsource servicing; and an IT …
Dennis Winkler, Director, Jim Matthews, Managing Consultant, Alsbridge
Executives are all asking similar questions of their shared service organizations (SSO): “How do I get to the next level of shared services and realize more value?” “How do I change my SSO model to expand services and go global?” “How do I drive continuous process improvement initiatives?” “How do I deal with social media …
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