So how do you build a business where not a lot of people understand how you make money and many assume you're a not-for-profit that provides the industry with free research?

The answer is simple: flood the market with a daily dose of insight and have everyone feel part of what you are doing.  Make your information company open, social and collaborative; make everyone feel like they are a "client", even when they are not. Make people want to spend time reading your stuff and also invite them to weigh in with their views and opinions.

Do you feel like a member of Facebook, or LinkedIn, even though you probably never gave them a dime?  Of course you do - and you probably don't think too much about their business models... However, because we do get asked about ours' frequently, we thought is high time to reveal the secret source of our business model... in all its naked glory:

1. We make money selling premium research.

In case you haven't noticed, we are producing over 30 awesome flagship Blueprint reports this year, each encapsulating an entire market, profiling and rating all the key service providers and defining the process value chain, the key trends and dynamics. That's the core 30 services markets

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Posted in: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  HfSResearch.com Homepage,  IT Outsourcing / IT Services

Get ready! We're Coming to San Francisco!

You may have heard we just announced our first-ever Working Summit for Buyers in San Francisco at the St. Regis Hotel May 26th - 27th. The summit's theme—Vision 2020 for Intelligent Operations—brings together the IT and business process services industry's brightest minds and stakeholders. Seats are limited and available at no cost to well-qualified senior buyers. So, if you are interested, pencil us in your calendar and apply for a seat now.

Unvarnished Discussion Sessions

• The State of the As-a-Service Economy and Intelligent Operations: Is It Here?
• Evolution or Revolution: What does the Future really Look Like?
• The Current State of Intelligent Automation – what’s working and what’s not for buyers
• Service Automation: Robots and the Future of Work
• The Digitization of the Finance Function
• Co-inventing for the As-a-Service Economy
• Hiring for As-a-Service Skills and the Role HR must play in the As-a-Service Economy
• The evolution of Omni-Channel for CRM: What is it really, and does is exist?
• Analytics and Big Data in the As-a-Service Economy… what’s really coming next?
• Getting ahead of Trust and Security in the As-a-Service Economy
• The C-Suite Advisor – Buyer Face/Off
• The C-Suite Service Provider Shootout

Featured Discussion Leaders

• Mary Lacity, Curators’ Professor, University of Missouri
• Lee Coulter, CEO Shared Services, Ascension Health
• Allison Sagraves, Chief Data Officer, M&T Bank
• Phil Fersht, CEO HfS Research
• Carol Britton, CPO, Bank of New York Mellon
• Charlie Aird, Global Leader, PwC Shared Services and Outsourcing advisory
• Chip Wagner, CEO Alsbridge
• Dave Brown, Global Lead, Shared Service & Outsourcing Advisory at KPMG
• Dennis Howlett, Co-Founder, Diginomica
• Dilip Vellodi, Chairman and CEO, Sutherland Global Services
• Jay Desai, Senior Director, Enterprise Outsourcing, AbbVie
• Gajen Kandiah, Executive Vice President and General Manager Cognizant Digital Works and Business Process Services
• Harry Wallaesa, CEO, The W Group
• Jesus Mantas, Head of Global Business Services, IBM
• Joe Frampus, Partner, Avasant
• Kevin McDonald, VP of BPO Governance, The E.W. Scripps Company
• Leslie Willcocks, Professor, Workforce and Globalization, London School of Economics
• Mark Voytek, Partner, Ernst and Young
• Michael Corcoran, Head of Strategy, Accenture Operations
• Pradip Khemani, Head of Global Business Services, Blue Shield of California
• Scott Furlong, Partner, ISG
• Shantanu Ghosh, SVP & Global Head – CFO & Transformation Services, Genpact
• Srinidhi Rao, Head – Service Management and Process Excellence, Juniper Networks
• Tony Filippone, Senior Vice President, Outsourcing Management, AXIS Capital
• Robin Rasmussen, Partner, HR SSOA KPMG
• Vishal Sikka, CEO Infosys
• Wesley Bryan, Co-Founder, OneSource Virtual

HfS Analysts

As usual, we'll have a full contingent of HfS analysts on site to present the latest data and stimulate discussions. In San Francisco, we'll have Phil Fersht, Charles Sutherland, Barbra McGann, Fred McClimans, Melissa O’Brien and Reetika Joshi.

Posted in: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  Captives and Shared Services Strategies,  Cloud Computing

Oh boy - the amount of fantastical claims we are being spoon-fed by some experts in the market today is just getting a bit absurd:

• McKinsey believes as much as 45% of current jobs could be replaced using technology that already exists;
• Forrester claims 1 million US B2B sales jobs will go away by 2020;
• Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025;
• According to an Oxford University Study, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk;
• Stephen Hawking warns us that AI would be the biggest - and possibly the last - event in human history;
• The Guardian (bless them) even highlights Scientist Moshe Vardi's view that the oldest profession in the world is under threat of being robotized (interesting...).

The beauty of all these wild predictions is that few will remember who made them in a couple of years - or the fact they were made at all.  That's the beauty of being an analyst/visionary in today's market - you can make up any old fantastical crap and never be held accountable for it in the future.  (Not that I have ever been guilty of said behaviour...)

Most of these claims are moot, as most of these "jobs" have already been automated away, or moved offshore

Let's dissect this quickly:

Rote B2B sales and customer service jobs have already gone away.  Forrester's jaw-dropping prediction is a simple case of analysts predicting things that have already happened to create some headline noise. Most B2B transactional customer service tasks have already been automated, or at least offshored.  I'm sorry, but I can barely think of a single instance where I have spoken to a customer service rep, except some instances when I needed to make a large purchase, or I had an inquiry so unique, there was no way to automate it. And even when I do need to talk to someone, I often get scripted responses from some rep in India or the Philippines - my recent complaint

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Posted in: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  Buyers' Sourcing Best Practices,  Cognitive Computing

Last week, the HfS Leadership team went all in on the 2016 NASSCOM Industry Leadership Forum (ILF) in Mumbai with 4 presentations and panels, dozens of meetings with industry leaders from providers and clients, multiple media interviews and local delivery center visits thrown in for good measure.  So myself and Charles Sutherland jotted down our thoughts as we fought off the lurking jet-lag demons on our way back to the States yesterday...

Most refreshing this time around, has been the toning down of the rhetoric and hype, as most of the providers tackle the winds of change threatening a worrying decline of growth in the global services industry.

From this year's proceedings, we have taken to heart the near ubiquitous discussion of “Digital enablement and Disruption” to construct a sentiment analysis of where the stakeholders in ILF currently find themselves in their transition from a world of legacy operations to delivering what HfS has termed the “As-a-Service Economy”.

From enthused to unsettled, service providers sober up as reality sets in

In a word, we felt the sentiment of the ILF sessions in 2016 is best described as the global IT services industry being “unsettled”.   Last year, we saw the pervasive adoption of “Digital” as the driver of future growth for every service provider at ILF, with a different definition in every instance as to what it meant. The ILF sentiment in 2015 was “enthusiastic” in a word.   Over the the course of the past year, we believe most of the service providers are awakening to the degree of change necessary to move to a new model that delivers Digital value based on technical capable offerings, untethered to huge incremental headcount investments.

While seeing some early client successes, most smart service providers are also questioning whether each is as differentiated in their capability and messaging as they believed a year ago. It is becoming abundantly clear, as the industry wakes up to the reality of what is really needed to evolve to the As-a-Service economy, that the differentiation points between service providers has become blurred - and being able to demonstrate true distinctiveness and differentiation from each other has become a very difficult task.

If in 2015, every service provider at ILF wanted to brief HfS on the excellence of their Digital offerings, in 2016 the conversations were inquiries, seeking to test the efficacy of a service provider’s messaging against that of competitors and against buyer requirements and expectations.

Six Factors causing this “State of Unsettlement”

So what has caused this change to a State of Unsettlement, amongst the service provider community in just 12 months? In short, we believe it has been a mix of six factor factors, namely:

1. A rise in global economic uncertainty, exacerbated by the instability of the Brazilian, Russian and Chinese economies, record oil price lows, a volatile and unpredictable stock market globally and the creeping threat of deflation;
2. The rise of new “born in the cloud” competitors, such as: Aason, Bluewolf, Equiniti and OneSource Virtual which can offer significantly more cost effective solutions and different delivery models;
3. The increasingly viral adoption of Intelligent Automation in service delivery;
4. A recognition that Digital is not just a supplemental technology spend to the legacy business, but a fundamental change in how the underlying business model operates (for clients and for service providers);
5. The increased relevance and disruptive competitiveness of nimble mid-sized service providers (IT and business process) that can scale up and down aggressively to win deals, based on client needs and their own intentions to invest in the future model, such as EXL, Genpact, Hexaware and Virtusa;
6. Increasing engagement with mid-market clients, which frequently have requirements as complex as the high-end, but cannot spend anything like the same amounts. Many of these clients will form the FORTUNE 500 of the future and most traditional service providers are simply not equipped to take these clients on profitably with their current delivery models.

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Posted in: Analytics and Big Data,  Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  Cognitive Computing

We're excited to speak at four sessions at Nasscom in Mumbai, culminating with our State of Industry session at 11.15 this morning. Come along and discuss what's really going to hit us down the road...

No more legacy as HfS reels off the insights at the 2016 Nasscom India Leadership Forum

Posted in: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  Digital Transformation,  HfSResearch.com Homepage

The pharma industry has been in a state of constant flux for a very long time. I can recall intense discussions at the turn of the Millennium, when we debated how the industry could survive the demise of the blockbuster drug model amidst the rise of generics... yes it still prevails.

The quirkiest issue I have observed with pharma, over the years, is that their leading firms like to outsource all the high-value work, such as contract manufacturing, drug discovery and R&D, while keeping the back office stuff inhouse, namely IT, HR and F&A. Pharma has been the weird stepchild of outsourcing - moving out the core, while retaining the non-core.

Fortunately, we have Barbra McGann, our Executive Vice President, Business Operations Research, to lead the charge in researching our first-ever Blueprint Report on Pharmaceuticals Industry-Specific BPO to delve into how our leading pharma are behaving, and how the service providers are performing to attend to their needs.

So let's ask Barbra to take few minutes to tell us about the report...

Click to enlarge.

Why produce this Blueprint report now, Barbra?

Barbra McGann is
Executive Vice President, Business Operations Research (click for bio)

There is some pretty spectacular and mind-boggling activity today in the pharmaceuticals industry, with the 3-D printing of pills, use of IBM Watson to cull through reams of data and help diagnose and personalize therapies, and edible devices that can transmit data and images. Behind the scenes, too, there are some significant changes underway that are also critical to helping this industry—enabling it to operate in a way that re-focuses on the patient, and helps pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical technology companies shorten trial times and accelerate time to market, increase medical adherence, reduce risk, and manage compliance. This operations support, having taken shape over the past two decades as the Pharma BPO industry, is on its way now to the As-a-Service Economy—with service providers bringing together industry and operations experts, digital technology and new operating models to collaborate with willing service buyers.

Two of the significant ways that pharmaceuticals companies “touch” consumers are in the R&D process and through sales and marketing (aka commercial services). The pharma BPO market in this Blueprint covers clinical data management services, safety management services, regulatory affairs support, and related sales and marketing—all activities that we recognize are part of a highly regulated, complex market in the midst of global

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Posted in: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  Buyers' Sourcing Best Practices,  Healthcare and Outsourcing

Go on - dare you to be honest =)

Click to Enlarge

Posted in: HfSResearch.com Homepage,  HR Strategy,  Talent in Sourcing

Derk Erbé is Research Managing Director covering Digital Business Transformation and Energy, Utilities and Resource Industries for HfS (click for bio)

You may have noticed we've been doing a little expansion at HfS recently... And a big part of this was building out our European presence and adding more industries to our research coverage.

One industry we've always been passionate about is energy, and how that sector is dealing with huge regulatory impact post the Paris Climate Agreement - where both energy providers need to rip up their operating models to survive, and enterprise energy consumers can take advantage of new sources of renewable energy to gain a competitive edge.

So who better than to hire an Amsterdam-based energy expert with a penchant for technology and research? So without further ado, let's introduce you to our new Managing Director for Research, Derk Erbé...

Welcome, Derk! Can you share a little about your background and why you have chosen research as your career path?  

Thanks for the warm welcome. I'm very excited about joining HfS. I feel research, and the role of the industry analyst brings everything I experienced in my career and found to be critical together. I have been in the trenches of technology implementations, business transformations and operating

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Posted in: Digital Transformation,  HfS Research Company News,  HfSResearch.com Homepage