Risk-Reward 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.

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

Special Recognition For Outstanding Service

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Johnson & Johnson, the largest and most diversified healthcare company in the world. Deutsche Bank, one of the world’s leading investment banks. Boeing Company, a leader in the aerospace industry. Glaxo Wellcome, Inc., a leading research pharmaceutical firm. Rohm and Haas, a specialty chemical company. BP Amoco. Nokia. CNA Insurance. And PSEG, an electric and gas holding company in 13 countries. The roster of satisfied customers of outsourcer, Hewitt Associates, is a Who’s Who of leading world-class companies. Each of those companies recognizes the role their employees play in making their companies successful. They also recognize that their ability to recruit and retain high-caliber employees depends heavily on the benefits programs and quality of human resources services extended to employees.

Getting a Handle on Purse Strings

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Because of its poor position with respect to costs (three years ago), the bank hired Peter Donald, an outsourcing veteran with noted success for the City of Melbourne. ANZ wanted him to identify outsourcing opportunities and to apply his prior successful principles in implementing outsourcing for the bank. Donald recalls that this departure from conservative thinking sparked internal challenges. Although the bank had decreed that something had to be done about its costing structure, there were degrees of tension among management when it came to identifying which opportunities might be selected. The opportunity identified was the bank’s procurement — its sourcing function — because it was not providing the level of strategic importance to the bank that was desired. We spend just under $1 billion Australian dollars per year in Australia and New Zealand (a total of about $1.5 billion worldwide) on a whole range of items from telecommunication to stationary, from technology to marketing and travel,

Outsourcing is Taking Three Forks

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Traditionally, outsourcing has been IT oriented. Today, however, outsourcing is taking three different paths. I see outsourcing falling into three distinct categories: the traditional IT suppliers,† the application service providers (ASP), and the business process outsourcing (BPO) suppliers. Different currents are buffeting each sector. Historically, IBM, EDS and CSCformed the top tier of the IT …

Double Digit Growth for BPO

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

There was a huge up tick in business process outsourcing (BPO) in 2000, says Julie Giera, vice president at Giga, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research and advisory firm specializing in the technology industry. She attributes BPO’s double digit growth to the popularity of Web-enabled offerings. BPO soared because companies are seeing the benefits of using an application service provider (ASP). Giera defines the ASP model as application rental over the Web.

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