Category Archives: Outsourcing and Politics

SOPA-thetic: Using an elephant gun to hunt for butterflies

January 19th, 2012

If you were surprised to find Wikipedia offline yesterday, you weren’t alone: many Internet users were unaware of the widespread one-day online protest against SOPA and PIPA, two bills before the US Congress designed to fight online media piracy.

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The Sourcing Raj Part II: “You don’t have to be Indian to be a global outsourcing provider!”

January 9th, 2012

Would you kindly stay on the line to complete a brief customer satisfaction survey?

We complete our investigation into the dominance of India in the world of outsourcing, and whether or not the game’s up for non-Indian providers to come back into the picture

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Fed up with cheesy sales presentations? Well, here’s the web event you’ve been waiting for…

December 1st, 2011

So how can you make the sales process smell less like a Wisconsin dairy farm? Easy – simply join us for our next web event

Too late to compete with the Sourcing Raj? (Part I)

November 26th, 2011

HfS Research Fellow and Sourcing Change protagonist Deborah Kops investigates whether India has bowled an unplayable delivery to the rest of the world’s ambitious outsourcing businesses, or if there’s still a chance to nick it over the slips and get on the scoreboard… Let’s give Indian-legacy providers their due—they arguably initiated, then accelerated acceptance of [...]

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Why outsourcing professionals must stay in touch with the 99%

November 6th, 2011

Governments are very capable of passing measures very quickly to restrict outsourcing if things get really bad – and they won’t have any choice if the 99% demand it. All outsourcing stakeholders – buyers, providers and advisors – need to focus, more than ever, on helping organizations approach outsourcing as one supporting component of a holistic solution.

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Too many providers and advisors are being myopic with their clients and failing to understand their business pressures

September 21st, 2011

Our latest study shows that many buyer executives are, in actuality, in violent disagreement with many provider and sourcing advisor executives that they their business leaders are too “short-term focused”

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Genpact drives a Nissan into HRO

September 11th, 2011

Genpact has been working with Nissan for more than six years, providing finance and accounting, procurement, customer service, supply chain and analytics services. So adding HR services seems a natural extension of these services – even though Genpact has limited client experience of multi-process HRO.

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The undisputed facts about outsourcing, Part 8: Industries experiencing secular change have more aggressive outsourcing plans

August 29th, 2011

Those organizations being impacted by radical, fundamental shifts to their very industry economics, are more prepared than ever to admit they need to look outside of their current organization boundaries to keep their business operations cost-competitive. Simply-put, secular change crystallizes options for businesses and the outsourcing planning process often becomes more clear-cut as a result.

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Will a Double-Dip Recession reverse the trend of buyers “delaying outsourcing” during a slump? Here are 10 factors to consider…

August 22nd, 2011

Organizations have always been wary of outsourcing during recessions. While today it delivers cost-reduction to clients in spades (proven emphatically during our recent state-of-outsourcing study), many organizations have proven, in the past, to push it down the priority-list of radical cost-reduction measures, when they fear for their very existence. However, with the threat of a “Double-Dip” recession very much a grim reality, HfS believes this cycle is likely to be broken.

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Is the outsourcing industry really still that clueless about cultural issues? Or high time to change that record…

August 12th, 2011

In Brandi Moore’s “painful” interpretation of the joint research we did with Softek about Latin America as a sourcing destination, she manages to disparage an entire industry, ignore the facts, offer tired examples as brilliant self-aggrandizement, and demonstrate a poor understanding of her supposed field of expertise (culture). We often take a tongue-in-cheek approach to our coverage here, but we take the accuracy of our research and reporting very seriously.

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Offshore outsourcing killing innovation? Time to change that record, please Professors…

July 27th, 2011

The provocative interview of two Harvard Business School intellectuals in CIO Magazine is making the rounds and generating some interesting discussion. It will undoubtedly stoke the already heated fires of the sensationalist anti-outsourcing crowd and provide fodder to those who say that offshore outsourcing detracts from the “client” companies’ and countries’ competitiveness. The problem is that the argument being made, that outsourcing higher-end, higher value business processes will lead to erosion of the ability to innovate is at once obvious and flawed.

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Listen to Cassandra when it comes to sourcing change management

July 11th, 2011

Earlier this year, HfS Research leveraged its vast network of global enterprises to solicit the opinions of buyers and providers of outsourcing attempting to understand how they view the role and importants of change management for outsourcing engagements. The web based survey was completed by 237 respondents with 96 buyers and 141 service providers.

The biggest political threat (yet) to the outsourcing industry

July 9th, 2011

The Swiss, in their typically punctilious fashion, now have an “Anti-PowerPoint Party” with the self-stated goal of having the number of boring PowerPoint presentations on the planet to decrease and the average presentation to become more exciting and more interesting.

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Genpact looks for added bite with Tiger

May 16th, 2011

After 14 years, the effervescent Pramod Bhasin, now in his 60th year, is handing the reins to “Tiger” Tyagarajan, the company’s current COO, and long-serving member of the leadership team

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Outsourcing: a symptom of a failing education system?

April 27th, 2011

Most people still claim they really outsource to save money – of course that’s an immediate benefit, but you wouldn’t even be considering it, if you had operations in place that were really good.

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The truth about Latin American outsourcing…

April 6th, 2011

Today’s piece in CIO – “IT Outsourcing in Latin America: 9 Things Your Vendor Won’t Tell You” – sparked some further thinking from HfS analyst Esteban Herrera: The truth about Latin American Outsourcing

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HfS Podcast: Why Latin America? …And why now?

April 5th, 2011

HfS VP of Marketing Mark Reed-Edwards got together with Esteban Herrera, HfS COO, and Euan Davis, Managing Director of HfS’ European Research Practice get together to discuss the LatAm region and its development in the global sourcing industry.

New HfS Report: “How Latin America Powers Global IT Delivery”

March 15th, 2011

Latin American strategies underpin global delivery with increasingly mature services: Firms investigating service delivery from the region like the cultural familiarity bred by the influence of the US and Europe. Find out “How Latin America Powers Global IT Delivery” by downloadng our new report.

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And here are… HfS’ 2011 Outsourcing Predictions… on demand

December 9th, 2010

nd here we are, like clockwork, jumping on the tackiest, lamest marketing exercise every analyst, consultant, CEO, and wannabe thought-leader always persists in doing… because you are supposed to gasp “Wow – they are predicting the future!”

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Sole sourcing and the Lindsay Lohan experience

October 5th, 2010

When a customer decides it has already found its provider-to-be, and wants to avoid the conflicting emotions of exploring what might-have-been with its competitors, it can inadvertently offset a spiral of sanity-losing issues for both parties, as they prepare to walk down the aisle

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