Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
At LaQuinta, the inbound call center has been an outsourced function since 1996. Jackie Burke, Vice President of Reservation Services for LaQuinta, says the company has no reservations — that is, no doubts or misgivings — about its choice of outsourcing supplier for this extremely important function.
Chris Pryer, Business Writer
Today roads, and the maintenance they require, are as important as the vehicles that traverse them. And if you’ve paid any attention to today’s news — or your daily commute to work — you are probably aware that roads, like much of America’s infrastructure, are literally going to pot. Local streets, county and state roads and highways, even the nation’s mighty interstates — they are all crumbling under the sheer weight and volume of our ultra-mobile society. State and local governments are hamstrung with the challenge of meeting other fiscal responsibilities (mainly social services) that have greater priority, as well as funding much-needed street and road maintenance and expansion. These projects take a lot of time — and money. To save both, governments are looking to the private sector to do the job of maintaining streets and roads.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Born in August 1999, TrustData Solutions Corporation has already matured enough to take giant steps in the eSecurity arena. HIPAA experts agree TrustData’s solutions are probably the most advanced technology today for allowing companies to enable HIPAA compliance.
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.
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.
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 Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
The I Love You virus did very unloving things to the computers of email readers who couldn’t resist opening the infected note. The malicious message did billions of dollars of damage. And an avalanche of email messages brought down Yahoo in a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. These high profile events made companies realize the Internet is full of lurkers and some of them are evil people.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Buyers are interested in transformation, says Joe Ragusa, vice president, Transformational Outsourcing for IBM Global Services, based in Somers, New York. They see outsourcing vendors as change agents who can provide the skills, processes and technology they need to enter the brave new economy. IT is enabling, adds Ragusa. The Web has created some strange bedfellows. Heated competitors are now working together in business-to-business (B2B) exchanges…
Raymond Angus
Innovation, creativity and individualism are the siren songs of this strapping birth child of the marketplace, appropriately dubbed ecommerce. Capturing attention on the Internet, and translating that curiosity into positive action, is the role played by a new breed of creative, outsourcing professionals; they are the web site developers. The manner in which a company presents itself on the World Wide Web can be a make or break decision. According to Mike McFarlane of Kiora, it’s not a decision that should be made hastily. He adds, it can lead the unwary into uncharted waters with a lot of hidden rocks! Professional web design help should be sought.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Long before the Internet, the travel industry has been in the forefront of computer automation. As far back as the 1970s, airlines that couldn’t harness technology effectively crashed and burned. (Pan Am and Eastern, for example.) But because of the complex nature of booking ocean liners, cruising has been the last bastion for manual bookings, according to David Anderson, vice president of technology for GoCruiseDirect.com, a Miami, Florida company.
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