The industry currently known as "outsourcing" is currently under its greatest-ever attack. President Obama has made attacking Bain Capital's promotion of itself once as a "one stop outsourcing shop", the focal point of his re-election campaign. And this is a serious attack - he has $512m in campaign money left to burn, and only $25m a month is currently being spent on attack-ads from both parties - the worst is yet to come. So how should the "outsourcing" industry deal with this?

Life been just dandy since you took 30% off your department's fixed costs, that you'll never need to do anything much again in your career... except stare at a spreadsheet? Just love keeping those lights on and squeezing penalty payments of your provider? No need to improve anything, because the way your firm does this is just, simply, perfect? Then you won't need to waste time with us and leading buy-side organizations from the HfS 50 Executive Council in Boston this October...

With its $4.3 billion cash offer, SAP answered every procurement technologist’s question, “Who is going to buy Ariba?” While this acquisition will rupture the procurement technology universe, HfS believes the real question that supply chain and finance professionals must ask is, “Now that SAP finally has a credible commerce network, can I eliminate and automate processes I’ve been busily outsourcing?”

At the end of the day, it's not all about outsourcing and it's not all about shared services; it's about focusing on how to globalize processes, how to transform finance (and other) functions, and how to govern it all in a global business services context. There is no dominant model, it's more about achieving the right balance across all delivery models to achieve the best business goals. In conjunction with global accounting body ACCA, We spoke to 682 large organizations currently running finance in either an outsourced or shared service framework (or both) - and the results are emphatic: those organizations relying predominantly on outsourced delivery, or predominantly shared services, are viewing their finance delivery performance much more skeptically

Missed last week's down-and-dirty Procurement BPO slug-fest between LA's Tony "Turbo-Charged" Filippone and Long Island's Bill "Bomber" Humber? Don't sweat it, as here's the replay of these two Industry heavy weights

YOUR APPLE DEVICE MAY NOT BE AS SAFE AS IT APPEARS...

Pure-play procurement outsourcing heats up, triggering two name changes among procurement-focused service providers

The BPO industry has been going though an incredible evolution since the first major deals was cast, barely more than a decade ago, that it's high time we took stock and take a good look at the phases - or generations - through which our industry has progressed. And there are few people who have lived and breathed these generational shifts more closely that Accenture's BPO leader, Mike Salvino.

One of the highlights of 2011 was that great web-debate on the Future of BPO where 1,100 people across the globe dialed in to hear from our buy and sell families. Here were the highlights...

InfosysBPO has made its first substantial investment in the sourcing and category management space, picking up the lead Australasian provider Portland Group for $37m.