IT Applications Archives

How to Minimize Risks When Entering the Wireless World

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

People are doing wireless today without having thought about it first, and now they have some real problems, states John Stehman, principal analyst with the Robert Frances Group. They can’t even support all the devices they have out there. They have five to seven different devices and the help desk doesn’t even know what some of them are. Wireless technologies are still experimental, and Thomas Tunstall, Ph.D. with KPMG Consulting, believes it’s difficult to know which applications will catch on and which providers will be successful. Wireless technology is changing, coverage is changing, and providers and pricing are changing. Users are trying to decide if applications will have value. To enter this world requires a strategy built on flexibility and minimizing risk; both are best accomplished by outsourcing.

Wireless: To Be or Not To Be

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Wireless scares people, says Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst with the Robert Frances Group. The concept that you can get anything anywhere is easy to understand and sounds great, and what company wouldn’t want to give those capabilities to its staff and customers where appropriate? The problem is that the application is extremely difficult. There are several warring technologies out there, Braunstein explains, and the wireless carriers are having huge difficulties. Financial institutions and the healthcare industry are the early adopters of wireless technology. It’s also an ideal solution for a mobile sales force, traveling executives, field technicians, logistics and other processes. The media has touted the enormous benefits for companies to adopt this technology as an extension of access to the Internet while, at the same time, making a lot of noise about the immaturity of the technology and its failures in addressing business applications and user needs.

The Reasonings of CEOs and CIOs

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Difficult business problems require solutions that are based on sound reasonings. The Internet and new economy have so drastically changed the way business is done that today’s top execs must focus on how to change their companies. Change is necessary as technology and markets evolve, despite whether a company is competing successfully or losing market share. Long-range plans keep getting shorter and shorter, and the need for risk management in such an environment is increasingly recognized as a competency. Most organizations now are a hybrid of some internal departments or divisions and some alliances with outsourcers for various business processes. Why do so many chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) turn to outsourcing as a strategy to achieve their business objectives? Upon what reasoning do they base these decisions? Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst with the Robert Frances Group, whose clients are the top echelon of Fortune…

Fly Like an Eagle

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

As human genome mapping starts to produce results and new drugs are developed to eradicate or control some of life’s most significant challenges, the spotlight will be on pharmaceutical companies. Time to market will drive their efforts. But the pharmaceutical industry is highly regulated, so their innovative development efforts will require tight management and control, along with certain levels of configuration management and maturity models (CMM). Outsourcers such as MERANT provide powerful solutions that will allow them to fly like eagles. Keith White, MERANT’s vice president and general manager, explains that 70% of development projects fail and 90% of them are over budget and behind schedule. The challenges are obvious for, as he points out, When you have to develop a product that has to fit in to a million different environments, the risks and time and resources required to get them deployed and to maintain and manage them is expensive.

If the Shoe Fits

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Building for Future Competition and Growth Dramatic technological changes now regularly unsettle our ways of doing business, and this trend promises to wreak even more havoc in the future as technological advances occur even more quickly. Future organizational success already depends on strategies to make companies more agile in their ability to change so that their competitors don’t pass them by. Where will your company be five years from now? Successful companies will have evolved to operate in fresh new, more effective ways. Motivational speaker and author, John L. Mason, advises people that if the shoe fits, they shouldn’t wear it, for they are not allowing room for growth. Companies that don’t change but continue to operate as they do today will become eccentric, for growth and success require change. To stay in the game, executives must decide to stop doing things the way they have always been done, realizing that organizations have limitations and can’t be good at everything. To

ASPs Hit the Wireless Bull’s Eye

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Our mission at the Outsourcing Center is to promote outsourcing to be the first choice in strategic tools to use in achieving business objectives. One of the best ways to do that is to present to you illustrations of excellence in outsourcing, thus showing the value and benefits that can be accomplished. Of the many fine relationships we encounter, the best become recipients of our annual Editor’s Choice Awards. In this very popular annual awards issue of the Outsourcing Journal, we relate their stories so that you may duplicate their successes.

Birthing a BPO: The VC Route

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Web-enabled applications have made the BPO offering irresistible. Outsourcing typical BPO functions like finance and accounting or human resources continues to gain popularity because outsourcing helps companies reduce their risk. The outsourcing vendor is an expert in the field, so it can do a better job than the in-house folks who aren’t as up-to-date on the latest.

Wireless Billing Complexities Crave Outsourcing

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Current communication providers will need to revamp their system to handle billing processes for wireless services. Thomas Tunstall, Ph.D., at KPMG Consulting LLC, explains that the revenue streams that have come from voice will increasingly shift to data. Traffic from applications data traveling through the Internet will be usage based, rather than minutes based.

Downtime Detour

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Imagine that you own a retail gas store and the cash register goes down. You can’t sell gas or Twinkies. Now imagine, just for a moment, that you own over 1700 retail gas stores where this could happen. ARCO, a West Coast gasoline refiner and retailer, actually owns that many gas stores and a large convenience store network. Downtime can be disastrous, so ARCO outsourced its point-of-sale terminals to outsourcer, Getronics. When the Getronics help desk receives a call from one of the retail outlets, the staff diagnoses whether the fix will require a technician. If so, they must obtain the needed part from a depot, dispatch a technician to the site to install the part, and have it up and running within four hours from the time the call was placed — no matter how remote the location might be. It’s truly an extraordinary feat in logistics.

Strategic Defense

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

With technology requirements aimed squarely at their weakest point, yet with a goal to be the government’s choice to build 21st-century destroyers, BIW made the strategic decision to outsource all of its IT operations to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). We felt CSC would be able to support us in our effort to achieve our goal of being a technology leader and could do it at the rate at which our customer would like to see it done. Bowie admits that BIW had blinders on when it outsourced in November 1996, not realizing the extent of technological advancement that would be required. The original contract spend was about $27 million, and it has now grown to include new services and a value of nearly $50 million over four years. Because its customer was driving certain initiatives, BIW found it needed new PCs for all employees so that they could do design work more efficiently and win more government contracts.

Research & Insight

IT Applications

The Reasonings of CEOs and CIOs

ASPs Hit the Wireless Bull’s Eye

Birthing a BPO: The VC Route

Wireless Billing Complexities Crave Outsourcing

Downtime Detour

Strategic Defense

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