While the UK government is busily doing a tremendous job destroying the country's position as one of the world's great financial centers and multi-cultured commercial environments, one unlikely scenario is unraveling: the steadily devaluing currency, availability of labor (especially in its former manufacturing cities), and adequate education system is placing the country up the league as, now, the third-most attractive location to source business operations and IT support.  This is according to the brand new data from the HFS 2019 State of Operations and Outsourcing study, conducted with the support of KPMG, where we interviewed 355 operations leaders from 355 of the Global 2000:

Click to Enlarge

Bottom-line: As value from low-cost labor levels out, the focus shifts to increased complexity and talent closer to the business

As we reveal more of the new survey data, you'll see a prominent shift away from enterprise intentions to invest in traditional outsourcing pivot towards a strong desire to find partners which can support technical complexity in AI, hyper-personalization, and automation.  Net-net, enterprises need support staff close to the business with the ability to understand process and technical complexity that they have never before needed.  This doesn't mean that popular locations like India and Philippines will see their service industries plummet, it just means outsourcers and GBS leaders need a healthier balance of onshore/nearshore/offshore to bring it all together.  It also signifies a shift from "outsourcing" to "expertise partnering" that changes the location playing field significantly.  While the USA and China are no surprise as their host the world's largest economies and businesses, the UK is the surprise mover, as political conditions have created a more competitive market to invest in support services. 

Watch this space for more as we drip-feed you this incredible data over the next few weeks...

Posted in: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO),  Global Business Services,  IT Outsourcing / IT Services

We've reached a stage where we can start to assess the capability of leading service providers to deliver comprehensive services across key AI platforms, especially Microsoft's Azure AI platform and Google's emerging AI platform suite.  So without further ado, let's ask HFS' Research Vice President, Reetika Fleming, how she fared leading the two major Top 10 efforts this year...

Click for Detailed View

Click for Detailed View

Reetika - how are services around AI platforms progressing?  And specifically, what have you learned with regards to Google and Microsoft platforms?

We’re continuing to see AI ecosystems evolve around the big cloud vendors – Microsoft, IBM, AWS, and Google. From our recent deep-dives into the AI services alliances developing around Microsoft and Google, I can tell you that there are different strategies at play here. Google and Microsoft themselves have their own strengths and priorities, and the SI and consulting alliance partners are collaborating with them in different ways.

• Google’s portfolio of AI components, such as text-to-speech and computer vision, is a great starting point for a fundamental development layer. Google’s AI R&D leadership is

Read More »

Posted in: IT Outsourcing / IT Services,  Artificial Intelligence

When it comes to staying relevant in today's workforce, let’s get to the heart of the matter – YOU have a simple choice to make:

• Do nothing and be part of the “Frozen Middle”. Decide you can’t be bothered to learn anything new, so make sure your firm has the same attitude (or has a thin veneer of innovation masking a cesspool of lethargy and love of perpetuating legacy processes and business practices). And ride this next wave of hype out for a few years before you can quietly ride off into a comfortable sunset, or…
• Become a change-driver. Decide you have to get ahead of emerging technologies and their massive impact on business ecosystems and make sure your firm has what it takes to sponsor your burning ambition to drive cultural changes, new learning and ability to rethink how business processes and practices are wired.

Once you decide which of these two categories which you wish to belong, then make sure you’re in the right company to execute your survival plan… otherwise, leave and find one that is.

Because the data from the recent World Economic Forum jobs study shows half of enterprises are being held back because their staff fails to understand the disruptive changes in their industry, and an alarming 37% of enterprise leaders do not feel their current

Read More »

Posted in: Digital OneOffice,  Global Workforce and Talent

Are you as confused are we are with some of the recent analyst matrices floating around the industry this year?  Some products are performing completely differently depending on the analyst and how they "define" the market and whatever methodology they used to score each product.

However, one thing is clear:  at HFS we ensure we rely on a lot more than a briefing and a handful of rose-tinted clients served up by the suppliers themselves.  We reach out across our global network of power users (enterprise clients, advisors, and service providers) to get the true unvarnished experiences of robotic software. 

This is why we scrapped the 2x2 matrix last year and went for a direct ranking of suppliers, based across three critical variables:  execution, innovation and the voice of the customer.  HFS subscribers can click here to access the full 2018 RPA Top Ten report. 

On 2018, we introduced the "Voice of the Customer" to rank the leading RPA products across the experiences of 352 power users

In short, there are growing questions about whether "RPA" can deliver transformation on the promised ROI and outcomes, especially as most RPA initiatives continue to be small and piecemeal, with truly scaled RPA deployments are rare (only 13% of client boast any true scale to date). The industry is still struggling to solve challenges around the process, change, talent, training, infrastructure, security, and governance - hence our shift to re-categorizing and

Read More »

Posted in: Robotic Process Automation,  Robotic Transformation Software