Change is hard. Big change is harder. And big change in big companies is extremely hard. So it is not surprising that when it comes to large outsourcings, the amount of change can be a deal-killer. The friction costs of outsourcing can result in hurdles that are just too high…
An effective pricing model is a foundational component for long-term success in an outsourcing relationship. Success or failure in a relationship can often be traced in part to the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the pricing model. A good pricing model will create predictability while serving to align interests, allocate…
The topic of the day appears to be “big data,” meaning the aggregation, mining, and analysis of data. This data analytics helps determine customer profiles so that companies can tune their offerings and sell more of the right things to the right customers. As recently reported in the New York…
Transition Services Agreements (TSAs) have become common (and more complex) in corporate divestitures, mergers, and spin-offs due to the increasing operational complexity of the environments impacted by these transactions. And if M&A activity increases as expected, despite a slow start in 2012, these agreements will continue to play an important…
After deciding recently that peeking cautiously at quarterly brokerage statements might not be the best investment strategy, I can now say that while I’ve been sleeping at the investing switch for the last couple of years, innovation has been working overtime. Having scoffed for a while at what “good paying…
The following headline recently caught my attention: “Bill would OK secret privatization, outsourcing of Florida agency functions” What is not news is that State and Local Governments (SLGs) are struggling to maintain the services their electorates are accustomed to. Blame declining tax revenues caused by the housing market bust and…
News that Accenture Life Insurance Services has won an eight-year business process outsourcing (BPO) agreement with BNP Paribas Cardif may be a sign that the European life insurance and pensions market is set for increased outsourcing activity. According to Accenture’s press release, “Accenture will manage an important portfolio of BNP…
We have previously discussed on this blog the increasing difficulty that offshore service providers are facing in obtaining U.S. visas for its employees that are non-U.S. citizens (see “The Buzz about Visas for Offshore Service Provider Personnel and the Link to On-Shore Hiring“). The rejection rate for H-1B visa applications…
For the past decade or so, IT organizations looking to lower delivery costs have outsourced day-to-day IT operations activities to IT suppliers who in turn send the work to low cost locations (primarily India). Typically, this is done by executing a knowledge transfer process whereby the IT suppliers capture the…
There’s a small, but growing, group of people that are willing to purchase their own computing devices and software required to be compatible with their Windows-based colleagues, forego most of the help provided by their employers’ IT service desks, figure out how to gain access to exposed enterprise services and…