Phil Fersht steps down as HfS CEO

April 1st, 2013

After more than three years at the helm of leading research organization HfS Research, Phil Fersht will be stepping down as CEO to “pursue other interests”.  The HfS advisory board is meeting later this week to discuss potential replacements.

Advisory board spokesman, Ari Gibbs, has released the following statement:

“We appreciate Phil’s energy and sense of humour, but you can’t expect to run a profitable analyst business while giving away all the research and throwing lavish executive parties.  We will announce a replacement in due course.”

Phil Fersht to step aside as CEO of HfS Research

Fersht founded HfS Research in March, 2010, based on the success of his blog “Horses for Sources” and proceeded to assemble a world class pool of research talent to flood the market with research reports, surveys, white papers, webcasts, benchmarking data and forecasts.  Today, the firm has produced over 200 published research documents and caters for a global subscriber base in excess of 120,000 avid readers across all spectra of industry.

However, the firm’s revenue model has always remained a mystery.  According to one research subscriber, “The HfS experience has been incredible – the analysts actually talk to us like we’re human beings. We don’t have to dial 1-800 numbers and go through endless tiers of administration to talk to them.  They even write research that is readable and practical!”  However, when the subscriber was questioned as to the cost of the research, she declined to comment.

According to an HfS employee, who wishes to remain anonymous:

“Things have gotten so bad, we’re having to steal toilet paper from the Starbucks over the road from the office.  Meanwhile, Phil’s off swilling pink champagne with the likes of Stephen Dubner.”

One of HfS’ competitors greeted the news with trepidation, “Thank god he’s gone – how can you compete with a research firm that actually has personality and the confidence to give some of its research away for free?  We’ve been getting killed.  My concern now is they’ll actually replace him with someone with a business brain who will really hurt us”.

Members of the HfS analyst team remain focused, despite their wayward leader

HfS has been internationally acclaimed for its approach to research with many accolades, including being named as the most Innovative Analyst Firm of 2012 by the International Institute of  Analyst relations.  It is the new analyst brand everyone has been talking about that has disrupted the traditional analyst business of expensive paywalls, stuffy research and dubious vendor rankings.

“The sourcing industry owes Phil a great debt for bringing many of the core operational issues impacting firms to the mainstream business audience”, commented Randy Bender, Chairman of the Incontinent Association of Outsourcing Practitioners.  ”But he’s clearly running out of gas.  I wish him all the best with his future career, but I hope it’s doing something else, as we’ve had enough of him and his bloody blog”.

Oh… and one more thing….

Read More »

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Marketing’s Holy Grail in the modern age: Getting actionable insights from an integrated marketing optimization platform

March 29th, 2013

I hear there's a vacancy opening in HR...

How many times have you heard sales people complain “our marketing needs to be better”?  The role of the CMO is probably the most thankless job in the modern organization:  the executives expect great branding and messaging to be propelled through all the optimal channels to market to maximize awareness and, ultimately, increase sales.  And the marketing department rarely gets credit when things go well (that goes to sales), but always bears the brunt of the blame when revenue goals are missed.  What’s more, it’s always really tough for marketers to get budget approved to support the campaigns their organizations need to create awareness, educate their market and drive new sales activity.  Justifying the marketing ROI is probably the hardest calculation to produce in any organization.

When I was a young business studies student, the great Philip Kotler defined marketing simply as “Satisfying customers’ needs and wants profitably“.  I’d go even further – it’s about “Satisfying customers’ needs profitably while successfully managing the expectations of the sales function”.  To this end, HfS analyst Reetika Joshi has been taking a deep look at how leading service providers are trying to help CMOs today…

Getting actionable insights from an integrated marketing optimization platform

In 2013, our research shows three secular changes challenges challenging the success of the modern CMO:

»      Analytics and the big data movement is gaining momentum with the need to now look beyond traditional web analytics and siloed projects, towards comprehensive marketing analytics that optimize all marketing activities, be it inbound or outbound.

»      Mobile and the real estate value of the second screen: While addressing mobile in the past meant optimizing websites and emails to suit mobile formats, marketeers now need to rethink seriously the best ways to integrate mobile devices as important marketing channels as part of overall strategy.

»      Social marketing and the fall of paid traditional media: Beyond simply increasing social Read More »

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Step aside Magic Quadrant, hello Blueprint

March 24th, 2013

After three years of hard labor, we, at HfS, are proud to launch our first “HfS Blueprint” that we believe is the revolutionary crowdsourced methodology for evaluating business and IT service providers.  

The industry has been literally screaming at us to change the way analyst firms portray their assessments of service provider performance, and we’ve dug deep to leverage our massive community, our extensive buyer relationships and demand data, to facilitate what we truly believe is a major game-changer in the research analyst industry:  The HfS Blueprint.

Finally:  A genuine way to assess services providers that isn’t reliant on the arbitrary viewpoint of a single analyst;

Finally: A credible methodology to gauge the performance of service providers against “real” innovation and execution capabilities;

Finally: A performance assessment of providers that apportions importance weightings of each innovation and execution category based on data from our State of Outsourcing survey, conducted with the support of KPMG, covering 1355 enterprise buyers, influencers, advisors and provider executives;

Finally: A performance assessment of providers where exhaustive inputs from buyers and influencers shape the scoring (not solely a handful of rose-tinted client references from the providers themselves);

Finally: A customizable assessment tool where enterprise buyers can re-calibrate the weightings to assess their provider-fit based on their own unique needs.

Yes indeed – we threatened these Blueprints five months ago, and we’re now ready to launch the first one… in  the much vaunted, but still immature, market of Finance and Accounting BPO, which is currently growing at a double-digit clip.  Click here to access our first Blueprint in Finance & Accounting BPO:

Click to access the first HfS Blueprint Report (premium HfS subscribers only)

We are happy to discuss the Blueprint methodology in greater detail (drop us a note here) but essentially, in this example for F&A BPO, we assessed data from 745 live multi-process F&A BPO engagements to ascertain provider market shares, depth of client base, breath of execution and geographic scope of delivery.  We then conducted exhaustive interviews with multiple buyers and market advisors to help score providers against each other across all the sub-categories of the Blueprint using ExpertChoice, an advanced statistical analytics platform. We also received a tremendous amount of cooperation from (almost) all of the providers above, as we went through this exhaustive process to understand their concrete plans for the future, get really deep with their current client relationships, their overall vision and their appetite to evolve into higher-value areas of F&A BPO.

Congratulations to the Winners Circle and the chasing pack of High Performers… we’ll see how the picture has shifted in 2014!

Thanks to all who took part – you’ve helped create a little bit if research history.

You can download the full HfS Blueprint methodology by clicking here.

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Cheap and cheerful: Is this really as good as it gets for IT Outsourcing?

March 17th, 2013

Newsflash… Enterprises reduce costs by outsourcing, but struggle to achieve little else of value.  Well, on the surface, this would still appear to be largely true, but when you rummage even deeper under the covers, you’ll soon discover it’s more the legacy IT outsourcing deals which are still all about low-cost bums on seats, while we are actually seeing a few chinks of light with BPO that could resemble what we’ve been searching for since we started this damn blog… value beyond cost (gasp!).

So industry has spoken:  399 enterprises, (two-thirds of which have revenues over $3bn) recently took part in our 2013 State of Outsourcing Study, conducted with the support of KPMG.  And one chart, above all others, again illustrates the familiar frustrations outsourcing brings, better than any others:

Click to Enlarge

So what do we read into this data?

Outsourcing achieves its table-stakes goals and makes some progress providing value. On the strong positives, enterprises are achieving success when it comes to meeting their cost targets, globalizing their operations and even standardizing processes.  In fact, barely one-in-seven can claim to be actually dissatisfied with their meeting these goals to-date.  Also quite encouraging, is the fact that the majority of enterprises are achieving positive outcomes with higher-value areas, namely accessing capable talent and transforming processes, even though these are largely modest results for most enterprises.  Considering most buyers venture into outsourcing seeking these initial “table-stakes” goals of cost-reduction, global scalability and process standardization, you have to give a healthy thumbs up to those providers and buyers for achieving these initial objectives.  However, can today’s ambitious enterprises really turn around and claim they are happy with basic, operational success in today’s economy, or do they want to seek to move beyond ordinary?

Outsourcing is falling short when it comes to innovation and analytical value.  With all the puff Read More »

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No Payne no Gain for a Chief Customer Officer… Part II

March 13th, 2013

“Someone is needed alongside the CEO that understands the total changes in technology that are changing  customer behavior.”

           – Bill Payne, IBM, March 2013

In case you missed IBM’s CRM Chief Bill Payne’s return to blog-stardom during Part I, he discussed his vision for the creation of a “Chief Customer Officer” position within companies, who would report directly to the CEO.  In Part II, Bill discusses shifting mindsets, the impact of analytics and evolution of outcome-centric engagements impacting the marketing function…

Phil Fersht (HfS Research): Bill, with our next client summit dreamSource coming up in two months, the number one topic on the agenda that enterprise buyers have voted to talk about is “how to shift the corporate leadership mindset away from merely cost control to one of value creation”. Someone once said the definition of insanity is talking about the same problem in many different ways and always arriving at the same conclusion. How can we break this cycle, and is this something that you have seen with any of your clients?

Bill Payne is IBM's CRM Services lead

Bill Payne (IBM Global Services): This change in mindset can often involve a change of thinking at the top, and in some ways, I use that as evidence of why we do not have a chief customer officer. If you have everyone on the board of directors owning the customer, no one truly owns the customer. No one is truly driving the customer/consumer strategy. The CEO has a huge role in that, but in my view, you need someone with a different point of view, someone who really understands the change in generational behavior, change in technology, change in social, and actually injecting the organization with controversy and the reality around how the world is changing. I am not sure I see that in a lot of companies that they get it.  We have recently seen a major UK retailer go bust, Comet Group.  It had been doing well for many years, but one of the biggest drags to their development is that once they had ecommerce, it was not integrated with their bricks and mortar. Their customers rejected it because of the confusion between the costing and pricing on the website vs. stores, and their staff was not trained across the different platforms. It is a sharp reminder of the pitfalls of not integrating across all channels quickly.

What I see from an IBM perspective and from my space is that we are increasingly having sessions with customers about end to end.  No longer are they thinking contact center, no longer are they thinking CRM system, no longer are they thinking speech to text analytics. There are senior people saying: can you paint me a picture, show me a vision of the consumer end to end, and tell me how that can be deployed? Now, where we are seeing that? I have to say in emerging markets, such as Read More »

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Why the mid-market is the mother-in-law of outsourcing

March 9th, 2013

I want the best SaaS platform, some great BPO and a bunch of data scientists...

When it comes to outsourcing, dealing with the middle-market has been somewhat akin to dealing with the mother-in-law:  can be awkward to deal with, very hard to please, and always has complex demands on your patience and resources.  However hard you try, defining and delivering a solution that can deliver the outcomes you both want seems like the impossible nirvana.

However, as the wise ones among us have now discovered, winning over the mother-in-law goes a whole long way to achieving future happiness.  What’s more, those of you who have avoided addressing the mother-in-law’s demands will soon regret it…

However which was you look at it, many of today’s middle-market firms are going to be the F1000 of the future.  What’s more, most are seeking technology and sourcing solutions that can drive nimbleness and cost-effectiveness, as they simply do not have the prodigious people and technology resources within their IT, finance, HR, marketing and supply chain operations to manage their evolving needs. In fact, many of them can’t afford the top talent to run their operations, and those providers which can deliver it are already in high-demand.

Let’s examine what 399 enterprises had to say about their mission-critical objectives driving both ITO/BPO decisions in today’s market.  It’s already becoming abundantly clear that high-end businesses today, unlike their mid-market counterparts, are focused primarily on cost-reduction when outsourcing, as opposed to investing in new solutions and capabilities that providers could (and really should) bring to the table:

Click to Enlarge

Why aren’t today’s providers winning over their mothers-in-law to grease the wheels for their future success?

So… if most the providers are promoting their wondrous capabilities in terms of talent, technology and analytical capability, why aren’t they targeting those clients who actually want those capabilities:  the middle-market firms?

Providers are set up for high-end enterprise deals, not the mid-market. Sadly, most of today’s Read More »

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If SAP is like “pouring concrete into a company”, isn’t it time to reinvent business processes?

March 7th, 2013

Having been an analyst for the best part of nearly two decades, the big ERPs have always maintained a stranglehold over the majority of the global 2000.  Any service or technology enhancement has to connect / integrate / work-around the existing ERP template.  Entire operations departments essentially become structured around the ERP platform and dependent on their capabilities and relationships with their ERP vendor.

And the ERP premise has always been pretty good – accomplish standard, automated ways of doing things and you can employ less people to achieve the outcomes you want.  However, we all know how that has failed to transpire for so many…

Susan Scrupski is Research Fellow, Business Process Reinvention (Click for bio)

However, the world of business process solutions is finally changing.  Most mid-market companies looking at their first “ERP suites”, whether it’s in HR, or finance, or procurement etc, are going straight into the Cloud, with the likes of Workday, Netsuite, Ariba and so on.  It’s these companies evaluating business process solutions from scratch, or are simply at the end of their tethers beating the crap out of their legacy ERP systems, which are taking the leap and reinventing their whole approach to process management.  I firmly believe it’s many of today’s mid-market companies today that will make up the majority of the Global 2000 in 5 years’ time.

But let’s not get overly carried away…there isn’t a dramatic switch happening from the legacy ERP-driven firms to the new generation organization, where everything is run under a beautifully centralized global operating model, process flows are accessed in the cloud and all non-differentiating processes are outsourced.  It’s simply those firms ready for the new are growing in stature and scale, while those clinging to the old are trying to get smaller and leaner.  It’s about reinvention, not replacement; it’s about taking a completely new path, not simply papering over the cracks of the old one.

So without further ado, I wanted to introduce a spectacular new personality into the HfS family, Susan Scrupski, a legendary figure in the worlds of disruptive technology and social business – and Fast Company’s “Most Influential Women in Technology” in 2010 – who’s embarked on a pivotal new project with us entitled “Business Process Reinvention”…

Business Process 21C: The Jackhammer Tales

Over the past few months I’ve begun to reflect upon how I arrived here at the intersection of process and innovation in the Enterprise. It occurred to me that everything I learned as a researcher, a writer, and an industry observer in the services provider space (my pre-Internet career) now had great bearing on what I was seeing in the Enterprise as a result of the pace of disruptive technologies impacting the market. The question that kept re-emerging for me was: how are rigidly defined business processes that were hammered out in the 90s reconfiguring to adapt to better, faster, more efficient ways of meeting customer needs? Even more puzzling is, if my friend Josh’s old joke is correct, “SAP is like pouring concrete into a company,” how are large enterprises dismantling foundational ERP systems to include disruptive technologies? After all, no 21st Century business can stand to stay frozen in the past. Even SAP itself is retooling to provide greater flexibility and real-time actions and insights with its HANA in-memory database and its JAM social platform. Read More »

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A fiesta of financial services and analytics hits mid-town next week

March 6th, 2013

Wow, wow and wow.  There’s an Analytics for Banking, Finance & Insurance event in New York next week, and HfS Research is strolling down the I-95 to study the cerebral-ness.

We hope to see you when yours truly (Phil Fersht) moderates the “Leveraging 3rd Party Analytics Players : From a Transactional Support Partner to Turbo-Charging your Core Competencies” session taking place on Wednesday, March 13th at 11:30am along with Allstate’s Ferdinand Dungca and Wells Fargo’s Eric Legrand.

Yes! Its time to head to NYC on March 11-13th at the Sentry Center for a whirl-wind event. And not only have we negotiated our readers a discount, this time we’ve arranged an elephantine 50% off for your attendance:

To register, please email Yash.Maroli@exlservice.com to take advantage of the discounted rate.

We look forward to seeing you in New York City next week!

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It’s true! Freakonomics’ Stephen Dubner is coming to dreamSource…

February 28th, 2013

If you’ve ever read Freakonomics, you’ll know how excited we are to announce that co-author Steven Dubner has agreed to speak at our dreamSource event this spring. Here’s the press release that went over the wires this morning….

NEW YORK AND LONDON (February 28, 2013) – HfS Research (www.HfSresearch.com), the leading analyst authority, today announced that Stephen Dubner, co-author of the best-selling book Freakonomics that melds pop culture with economics, will attend dreamSource as the featured speaker for the April 30th evening event at The Ritz-Carlton, Westchester, New York.

No it's not April Fools' Day... Stephen Dubner is really coming to dreamSource

Mr. Dubner offers a way of getting beneath the surface of modern business practices: how to create behavioral change, incentives that work and don’t work, why consensus building often wastes time and resources, and how to achieve the business outcomes you expect.

“Stephen Dubner is a delightful addition to our groundbreaking agenda,” comments Phil Fersht, Founder & CEO of HfS. “He reinforces with both humor and poignancy the notion that the old rules of business no longer apply. His vision is right in line with the spirit of dreamSource and the purpose of the HfS Sourcing Executive Council – to shape the future global operating model for today’s ambitious enterprises and break out of the purgatory in which so many of today’s enterprises are trapped!”

Commenting on his attendance at dreamSource, Stephen Dubner said, “HfS is moving the needle with how today’s leading enterprises need to focus on evolving their global operations dreamSource will be a unique gathering of key enterprise stakeholders to find common ground on how the sourcing industry needs to move from “good enough”, to “getting better”. Too many enterprises are caught in a holding pattern and it’s gatherings like this which will help us find new paths to follow. I am personally excited to meet many of the folks at the event.” Read More »

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No Payne no Gain for a Chief Customer Officer… Part I

February 25th, 2013

Bill Payne is Vice President, CRM and Industries at IBM Global Services

Three years after his first appearance here, IBM’s Bill Payne has somehow survived appearing on such a disreputable media platform to talk to us about his refining vision for the future marketing function and, perhaps most importantly, how today’s businesses need to manage their most precious assets in the face of such fundamental change – their customers.

We managed to convince him to take time away from his prized vegetables to talk to use more about this vision for the CCO… The Chief Customer Officer…

Phil Fersht (HfS Research): Good morning, Bill. You recently wrote an article where you spoke about the road to customer centricity and how the world’s leading organizations are putting the customer first. In your experience, how has this been working and what is your vision for the future of the customer centric enterprise?

Bill Payne (IBM Global Services): Companies have always said that they put the customer first, and I think they genuinely believe they do. When the business world was made of just bricks and mortar, and on the primitive edge of the digital age, putting the customer first meant that you had to monitor the customer simply when they walked in the store or if they touched you digitally. The world is way more complex now, and what we have found is in large organizations, there is often no integrated  customer or even consumer strategy driven by the board. In an omni-channel world, Read More »

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HfS Market Index shows Outsourcing of IT and Business Processes to Grow by 4% in 2013

February 22nd, 2013

Yes, you heard it here first, folks:  outsourcing expenditure is mushrooming at the warp-speed clip of 4% this year to surpass $950 Billion, and expected to average a 5% clip each year through 2017:

Click to enlarge

How do we know all this?  

Because we have a super-brainy data guy called Jamie Snowdon leading our data and forecasting practice, where we pull together data from thousands of supplier contracts, revenue databases, inflation estimates, economic primers and – most importantly – from the thousands of buyers and Read More »

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HfS rated in the top right-hand-corner of analyst firms for influencing buyers and journalists

February 19th, 2013

“HFS Research was an outstanding performer in the Analyst Value Survey. Buyers of analysts’ services rate HFS Research as one of the most valuable providers, and one of a handful of firms whose influence grew most impressively in 2012″

Duncan Chapple of Analyst Equity, February 2013

Leading expert and commentator of the global analyst industry, Duncan Chapple, former board member at the International Institute of Analyst Relations and CEO of LighthouseAR, has announced findings from the Analyst Value Survey, which included 198 enterprise consumers of analyst research to understand how much influence each major analyst firm has on enterprise buying decisions and the media.

Considering this study was focused on major analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester, which cover broad enterprise IT and services buying trends (not just sourcing), we would be have been happy with finishing somewhere in the middle of the pack, but as you can see, we are making some pretty big waves in the enterprise. It’s pretty cool what you can do with a smart group of analysts a bunch of research and a blog:

Click to Enlarge

We, at HfS, are proud to represent the sourcing industry among the global analyst firms and help communicate today’s complex issues surrounding sourcing to the forefront of the enterprise agenda. Thanks for all your support.

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If outsourcing were an employee, it would be fired… Part 2

February 18th, 2013

It's never too late to find redemption...

So if you haven’t been fired yet, here’s how to avoid it happening…

Phil Fersht (HfS Research):  So, Lee, we talk about more of a fluid and evolving outsourcing relationship.  How can we get there? Why is such a large proportion of this industry stuck in the weeds, with so many companies persisting in doing things in such a short-sighted way over the last decade. Why aren’t we evolving these relationships?  What is holding us back?

Lee Coulter (Ascension Health): Phil, I think there are two primary reasons:

One is the most common misconception about outsourcing or shared services is that you can declare success. Some executives like to say “We’re done. We’re done outsourcing. We’re done doing shared services”. No, no you can’t! This notion that there is some finite initiative and there is some specific number of deliverables that you can check off on your old checklist and say “Oh I am done, yay”… that is a very common misconception by the leadership in many organizations.

The second one is that the work to continue to evolve the relationship, is really hard work. You Read More »

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If outsourcing were an employee, it would be fired… Part 1

February 17th, 2013

Lee Coulter is... Lee Coulter (click for bio)

The first time I spoke to Lee Coulter, I was an analyst at the old AMR Research (now Gartner) and managed to get him on the phone, where I hoped to convince Kraft’s global überlord of shared services, IT and outsourcing to spend a day at a roundtable I was organizing.  ”You’ve got 5 minutes to convince me why I should invest my time with you”, was his response. I knew straight away this was a guy who didn’t like to xxxx around.

Since then, Lee has been a great friend in helping us establish the HfS Research organization three years ago, in addition to lending his time and support helping us assemble the most irresistible community of senior sourcing practitioners.  For those of you attending our dreamSource summit this Spring, Lee and I will co-host a session entitled “If outsourcing were an employee, it would be fired“.  Lee, who today has built and now leads shared services for heathcare provider, Ascension Health, caught up with us last week to talk about the session and why we called it just that…

Phil Fersht (HfS Research):  Good morning Lee – a pleasure to get you on the line today. You’ve been a well known figure in sourcing shared services and outsourcing world for quite a few years now.  Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got to where you are today?

Lee Coulter (Ascension Health):  Sure, Phil, I guess it goes back quite a ways!  Originally, I guess I was starting my career in what wasn’t really an outsourcing or shared services configuration. Actually as a delivery guy, I was a service engineer delivering services to hospitals and health systems. Twelve years, later I had moved from delivering services for diagnostic imaging equipment Read More »

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Why middle management is often as influential as the C-Suite when it comes to outsourcing

February 15th, 2013

The official definition of insanity: asking the same question over and over again, from every conceivable angle, and always arriving at the same conclusion.

The official definition of insanity in sourcing: recounting how many times a service provider has asked you, ”We’ve got to get to the C-suite to pitch innovative ideas, because middle management is too risk adverse.”

So who better to analyse sourcing insanity than HfS’ own sourcing insanity analyst, Tony Filippone…

Are service providers addressing the right audiences?

Is there really a disconnect between senior executives and the rest of their teams regarding the importance of innovation during service provider selection? Will ideas fall on deaf ears unless a service provider can schmooze a CFO? Are service providers addressing the right audiences? We asked a few questions in our State of Outsourcing survey to delve deeper into the topic… Read More »

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Genpact joneses after JAWOOD to capitalize on healthcare insurance mayhem

February 9th, 2013

As HfS’ Tony Filippone recently prophesied, November’s election result would dictate the future of the US healthcare industry… and the titanic upheaval of Obama’s reforms is quickly being felt.  Consequently, providers such as Genpact, are wasting no time trying to seize the initiative, as Tony discusses…

Get ready for the healthcare market to heat up over the next three years as a result of state health insurance market places, the rapid expansion of accountable care organizations, and ICD-10 implementations.

On Friday, Genpact announced its acquisitions of JAWOOD and Felix Software Solutions. This announcement comes on the heels of Cognizant’s November acquisition of Medicall, a BPO specialist provider of medical talent to the payer and provider industries with nearly 800 resources. Clearly, leading IT/BPO services providers sense real growth potential from healthcare insurers (payers) bracing to cope with these seismic changes.  We explain the forces influencing the payer market more thoroughly in our February RapidInsight™, Regulatory Fallout or a New Beginning in Healthcare?

What is Genpact getting with JAWOOD?

JAWOOD is a privately held, Michigan-based firm with 400 employees with three particular strengths in the technology enablement of healthcare payor operations.

1)   It has a variety of existing client relationships with Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans serviced Read More »

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Banking in 2013: Control freaks who just can’t let go face their toughest challenges yet

February 7th, 2013

Question:  Which vertical industry really struggles to let anything remotely strategic go out the door when it comes to outsourcing?  No, it’s not public sector, it’s banking.  So why is this?

Banks are seeking to grow their revenues in many areas impacted by the recession, most notably lending services. As they regain momentum in areas such as mortgage processing and commercial lending, the operational support and infrastructure that many banks had previously down-sized, is again needed and outsourcing helps add that scale and flexibility in this volatile environment. Hence, while cost savings continue to drive outsourcing business decisions, the capabilities to scale up business volume and meet complex regulations are paramount:

Conversely, banking and financial services organizations are clearly not viewing outsourcing as an opportunity to improve analytical capability or transform operations. Clearly, many banking executives still view outsourcing as a utility solution and are yet to be convinced of the greater strategic benefits… or are simply control freaks who just can’t let go of anything remotely strategic Read More »

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Replay of the HfS/KPMG Banking & Financial Services webinar

February 6th, 2013

Missed last week’s Banking & Financial Services webinar?

If you weren’t still sleeping off your champagne breakfast, you may recall we discussed the 2012 market challenges and how they’re impacting 2013’s strategies and priorities.  We also managed to expose KPMG’s Stan Lepeak for who he really is… (Kiefer anyone?)

Well fret no more, as we have the replay now available for your viewing and a full slide deck for our premium research subscribers. Enjoy!

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Fooled by Forbes’ fantasy fiction?

January 30th, 2013

One issue dominating the tech-media back channels of late is publisher Forbe’s use of its column “BrandVoice” to promote blatantly various technology products, such as Oracle and SAP.

“What’s wrong with advertorials?” I hear you ask.  Well, simply put, BrandVoice articles are not clearly portrayed as advertorials, such as when you read a car advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, but appear to be regular news and opinion pieces.  For example, take a look at this write up of SAP’s “Pioneering Walk in the Cloud”, or Oracle’s “Why Exadata Is Rocking the Tech Industry”.  The only indication that these are sponsored columns, is the “BrandVoice” note at the top, if you happen to know what “BrandVoice” actually means. There is no sponsored content indication anywhere on the BrandVoice articles, not even a company logo at the top of the pieces.  Moreover, midway through last year, the column title was changed from AdVoice to BrandVoice, further blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

The list of praiseworthy articles is endless, and (seemingly) very convincing to the general reader, who is being fooled into thinking they are reading real journalism.  And why would you think these articles were suspiciously fictional marketing puffery, while skim-reading over your corn flakes and coffee? It’s Forbes, for chrissakes… has to be great content, right?

Sadly, these pieces are not even written by journalists, but by marketers within the respective Read More »

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Outsourcing may be battered, bruised and vilified… so why is only a twentieth of enterprises planning to reduce it in 2013?

January 27th, 2013

2013: A new dawn for a maturing outsourcing industry

Make no bones about it:  2012 was a pretty dire year for the industry known as “outsourcing”.

However, brand new data from our State of Outsourcing 2013 Study conducted with the support of KPMG, the largest-ever research survey focused on IT and business function outsourcing, clearly shows that the majority of enterprises are not only aggressively focused on increasing their outsourcing portfoilios, but many are now taking a more mature and realistic approach.

So, as always, let’s examine the facts…

How outsourcing got battered, bruised and vilified in 2012

  • A painful presidential campaign that positioned outsourcing as an evil activity, despite the fact US IT unemployment is running at 3.8% and tech salaries have now reached 10-year record highs;
  • A media desperate to jump on the fact that IT outsourcing must be in its death throes if GM’s Randy Mott was creating a few jobs on US soil;
  • Pundits, consultants and “analysts” claiming outsourcing is yesterday’s strategy for our enterprises, without really being able to explain why, but eager to bury it under the negativity.  Meanwhile, the fact that the great American innovator they love to laud, Apple, has been using Chinese children to manufacturer its wares, seems to escape practically unnoticed…
  • The outsourcing industry itself calling for a re-brand to escape the negativity.

Why outsourcing is more embedded than ever in corporate operations strategy

1355 stakeholders across enterprise buyers, service providers and consultant/influencer organizations shared their views, observations and intentions for 2013 and beyond, when it comes to outsourcing IT and business processes.  We are going to delve deep to share these dynamics with you in the coming weeks, but let’s start with the key dynamics – how fast is the industry growing, and what is driving the decisions:

399 major buy-side enterprises have spoken about their 2013 outsourcing plans, and barely a Read More »

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