Compaq buyers want their outsourcing vendors to introduce innovation and add value to their outsourcing contracts, observes Thomas Simmons, vice president, eBusiness Management Services for Compaq Global Services in Stow, Massachusetts. “Buyers want their vendors to be part of managing today’s complexity. They want us to think of different ways of doing business that they would never have thought of,” he says.
With the advent of the Internet, Simmons says technology is now “everybody’s business.” So buyers are turning to their suppliers for help in sorting out the impact of the new economy. Simmons says buyers want guidance understanding the various business models and technology approaches they need to consider. “They ask us, ‘What will make us more successful?'” he reports.
Today companies are measuring the performance of their chief information officers by their skills in transforming the business. CIOs turn to vendors like Compaq to create a metamorphosis around the company’s basic business proposition that the buyers would be unable to achieve by themselves.
Buyers want to be more responsive to their own customers. They demand cycle time improvements to do this. And they want to do this on a global basis, continually. These demands become the vendor’s responsibility.
In the past, vendors sold technology solutions to cut costs. Now, Simmons says, buyers are more interested in the business impact of outsourcing. “They look to outsourcing as a way to achieve business goals and pursue new opportunities,” he says.
Compaq’s outsourcing approach, FutureSourcing, provides the transformational capability companies seek. Compaq’s goal is to “get a company where it needs to be–faster.” Simmons says the modus operandi now is “in support of” instead of “in place of.”
The speed to market issue has caused buyers to insist on an end-to-end solution from their vendors. They are not interested in outsourcing individual components, Simmons says.
Lessons from the Outsourcing Primer:
- Buyers today want innovation from their suppliers.
- Future sourcing helps vendors transform a company’s traditional value proposition.
- The business impact of outsourcing is more important today than the ability to cut costs.
- Faster is becoming the operative word in outsourcing.
