In my opinion ACS and ADP do not just share common first letters but also a similar business model, where both had a significant focus on federal business. This does provide a stable long term revenue, but a consequence can be a slower growth rate compared to its peers.

Xerox and ACS have the benefit of a similar culture and they should not face the challenges that some corporations face of integrating operations.

Focus for Xerox Services should be to identify high growth business in which it can invest in to better compete with some of the earlier adapters of offshore outsourcing.

Mrinal Singh

Web Presence
http://about.me/mrinal.singh http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrinalsingha
twitter: mrinalasingh Blog: blogs.ittoolbox.com/emergingtech/trends/

Linkedin Group Moderator:

offshoring to India: http://goo.gl/Nukb
Outsource Mobile Application Development: http://goo.gl/dlbN

I couldn’t agree more with your arguments here. The conversation shouldn’t be about whether one rigidly follows a political party policy – it needs to be one about how government can help grow and promote its domestic industries. Why else has China won the manufacturing game, and India IT services? Because their governments actively helped their businesses with significant financial backing. How else were GM and Chrysler turned around? Great marketing, new products? Ring the other bell! We’ve left our domestic industries to flounder for far too long – it’s time to get them on the right track and slow down the constant flow of jobs and investment to other countries,

Paul

The issue with global sourcing is becoming as much about availability of accessible skills as it is lower costs. Also, western firms increasingly get growth from offshore markets, not local markets mired in debt and striving for growth levels in the 2-3% range, so why not services from those same markets. And manufacturing, with long tangible – and has recently been shown – fragile supply chains, is a different situation from global services. Policies should reflect market realities not try and deny them.

Hi Bill – wasn’t it Dubbya whose last act was to bail out GM?

My political affiliations are tied to what makes sense in creating jobs and growth – not some liberal-socio agenda

And one more thing – all this talk about big government etc., but who ran to the help of the banks when they were all taking us under? Seems like there is one rule for some, and those rules shift when it doesn’t affect them financially….

PF

Your best blog for a while. Really good talk-track on where government needs to prioritize – less rhetoric, more action!

Graham

Phil – You’re political leanings are rather glaring showing here…

Tara Kelly

I agree. Consulting does not equate thought leadership per se. Today’s (and even more tomorrow’s) landscape of outsourcing is about transformation. You guys at HfS have demonstrated that time and again. Transformation requires thought leadership to be successful. However, there still is the very real issue of who is going to pay for what. In the ideal world of a market leader of outsourced services, their overall clout, brand recognition, impeccable track record and indeed their unique thought leadership should win them fantastic new deals with the blue chip companies they target without much distraction from competitors. I hear that some actually manage to do so occasionally. But more often than not, a willingness to outsource any significant part of a company’s operations will trigger a competitive bid process, which means that success will not be certain and that margins might be dragged down, raising the risk profile of the deal. Thought leadership under all its forms, thrown- in consulting and all sorts of pre-sales activity are expensive enough if you win such a deal, but if you don’t then you will not be in a good shape to try the same thing again too often. And at all times there is the risk that thought leadership, given for free to a not-yet-customer, might serve to prepare the way for a deal eventually won by an arch-rival.

William (Bill) Lennon | CEO
GroupBDO® | Enterprise BPO Sales Solutions
Frost Tower Financial Center, 401 Congress Avenue, Suite 1540, Austin, Texas 78701 | Corporate Office +1 512.852.4356 | Skype wlennon1
>Powered by Human Engineering™ | http://www.groupbdo.com

I’m not sure the ITO and BPO players need dedicated, high end consultants that sell pure consulting. Frankly, the commentary from buyers when they engage in pure consulting with outsourcing teams goes something like this, “$400/hour? My contract says $25/hour! Isn’t he the same guy?” It is particularly hard on the Indian-based firms who have tried.

And thought leadership doesn’t need to come from consultants to be credible

Organizations like Accenture and CapGemini have proven that sophisticated, experienced consulting teams can be a benefit to clients planning and executing a transformation and major process improvement initiative. Their thought leadership earns them the credibility to be in the C-suite, even if to start the conversation.

As it relates to Xerox, I’m certain they want to compete at the same level. Frankly, if you spend a couple of weeks with them in their sweet spot, you’d be impressed because there is real depth there. And, because it comes from experience earned in the trenches, it becomes tangible to clients. If Xerox invested more in thought leadership, they’d open new doors and win more opportunities, as well as change market perception.

IBM’s transformation from elephant to creator of Watson is an example. There’s a real opinion among today’s buyers that IBM is innovative because of this and their relentless investment in thought leadership which is frequently expressed through acquisitions.

Naturally, it always delights me to read that a BPO?ITO provider needs to invest heavily on thought leadership and high-end consulting, for it is an obvious truth, however self-serving I might sound writing it myself. My own experience though is that it is easier said than done, for several major reasons.

One is that consultants need to be independent if their advice is to be taken seriously by clients ready to pay big buck for it, but that is hard to achieve when as a consultant you share a brand name like Xerox (or IBM or Infosys, or many others) and even more so when your advice is about stuff that the rest of your company sells. In truth, it is a permanent careful balancing act for the consultants.

Second, it is a rather expensive long term venture to invest into a credible consulting arm. With less than assured prospects of speedy return to promise, it is often an uphill battle to secure patience, continued support and funding against internal rivals (I mean colleagues) from more established business units or service lines.

Third, consultants are more than ever birds on a wire. There is a worldwide scarcity of talent. Attracting the best and brightest to a company like Xerox is a challenge second only to retaining them for an extended period of time. One can seduce and lure them into it (and Xerox has a very good story to tell because I for one believe in enabling technologies to help make it happen in BPO for example), but a rigid, cumbersome, short-term driven, insensitive management and work atmosphere will disenchant many in a matter of months. Then they will leave and it will be back to square one.

Really I’d like to read a piece about that sort of things from the sharp minds of the Horses for Sources team someday.

Ramesh

As you mentioned, Xerox still seems to be in a quandary as to whether they are products or services,

Terry Fuller

Thanks for the laugh – and some people need a s.o.h.

Warren

What is harder to calculate is the business value to enterprises that will be lost when they start reducing their reliance on (if not outright abandoning) social tools as a means to interact with customers. The cost of policing comments sections in blogs, technical support forums, and other Web-based customer interaction mechanisms, whether done in-house or with the help of online reputation management services, will crimp the growth of an important customer contact channel.

I watched this video where the NBC VP for Legal said, “The bill won’t affect jobs”. It will.

Warren McDonald

Enjoyed your article. How do you view the prospects of suppliers from the Latin countries?

Manual Adame

A truly global player can never have a single geography focused operation, be it in terms of sales or operations. In fact large India based provider have still not taken on the role of global player as a significant part of the revenue is US driven and delivery is India centric.

On a sidenote Cognizant has long been investing significantly in hiring local resources for sales and account management and that has been a reason for their growth rate being much higher than some of there peers.

Mrinal Singh

Web Presence
http://about.me/mrinal.singh http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrinalsingha
twitter: mrinalasingh Blog: blogs.ittoolbox.com/emergingtech/trends/
Linkedin Group Moderator:
Offshoring to India: http://goo.gl/Nukb
Outsource Mobile Application Development: http://goo.gl/dlbN