Ned May, SVP Enterprise Mobility and Digital Services Research, HfS
Remember the days when standard corporate issue to enterprise staff was the monster-sized Dell laptop that only seemed to be made for the mass-market corporate crowd and needed a huge ugly Targus case to lug it around… and a low-end Blackberry, where the only redeeming feature was brickbreaker that could keep your brain amused for hours on those middle seats at the back of coach?
In fact, it was for these very reasons that executives slowly came around to realizing that the only cool technology they could get access to would come from their own personal investments, which is how Apple crept into the executive suite. Apple was just so anti-enterprise; YOU were in control and YOU could develop you whole digital persona using your iPad and iPhone.
There have been some insightful pieces penned on the landmark IBM/Apple alliance signed this week – notably from Larry Dignan and Peter Allen that go into the far-reaching potential consequences of this deal, notably the potential of providing iOS apps and embedded analytics tools to enterprises and disrupting traditional services models, potentially not too different from Workday’s impact on HR.
However, I wanted to draw your attention to HfS’ enterprise mobility analyst, Ned May, who focused on the simple fact that this alliance finally gets Apple into the enterprise through the front door…
“Apple has never understood the enterprise very well. While it has attempted to become ‘more friendly’ over the years and extended a few fig leafs in the terms of iOS updates that address enterprise grade concerns like security, Apple’s success in the enterprise has mostly been driven by its success as a consumer device. It has largely entered the enterprise through the front door in an executive’s purse or pocket not via a box on the loading dock that was backed up to IT. Further, Apple has been notoriously difficult to work with often to the frustration of a CIO. In short, while Apple’s support might be “legendary” it has not been the type of story that ends with someone riding off into the sunset. Which brings us back to the impetus behind this deal. At its core, it is about Apple realizing it will never understand the enterprise and that there is no better partner to get them over that challenge than IBM.
“In exchange, IBM gets to offer a message of safety to anxious IT departments who nervously watched iOS devices sweep into their formerly locked down playgrounds and ultimately opened them up to the chaos known as BYOD. As we pointed out in our Enterprise Mobility Services Blueprint (see link), the market is now reaching a stage of maturity where IT departments are being asked to rationalize the disparate mobile activities underway around the enterprise. As they do, many are looking to apply their traditional approaches to managing the challenges these new environments brings.”
Click here to access the full complimentary POV “The Day Apple’s Enterprise Strategy Came in from the Cold”
When we look at the future potential of BPO, one of the markets with the most untapped potential is that of supply chain services, which could be as large as $300 Billion in annual expenditure when today’s emerging offerings really begin to mature, and an increasing number of buyers have to tap into third party technology and services specialization.
When you think about the scope of this space, we’re talking about the management of orders, inventory, manufacturing and transport to get products to market, and then the whole additional services tied to after market needs, master data management and sustainability management:
The need for supply chain process, domain and analytics expertise, supported by the necessary technology tools platforms – at a global scale and depth – has never been as intense it today’s buoyant and globalized market place, where decisions needs to made faster than ever to keep many companies in business. So HfS analysts Pareekh Jain and Charles Sutherland set about the analyst industry’s first-ever attempt to flesh out the leading providers in this market with the 2014 Blueprint Report in Supply Chain Management BPO Services:
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So, Charles and Pareekh, what is driving buyer interest in Supply Chain Management BPO today?
For most enterprises the costs of goods sold is the vast majority of their income statement and the with SG&A having in many cases being squeezed extensively over the last decade they are looking for new ways to both reduce COGS but also to improve performance of their supply chains as well. As the world continues to globalize and both suppliers and customers become more distributed and more demanding it is strategically critical that enterprises rethink how they are managing these supply chains.
It’s taken quite awhile for the message to get out to the broader market that there are a variety of different SCM BPO service providers today who all have valuable offerings to help with the enterprise supply chain but we see that market knowledge and understanding is taking hold. There are so many pain points for both multinational corporations and domestic SMBs in their supply chains including the lack of end to end visibility, lack of standardization in processes, rampant inefficiency in transactional processing, shortcoming in the scale of operations as well as the lack of resilience in their globally dispersed supply chain that when SCM BPO comes along and offers solutions to many or all of these it certainly helps create the level of increasing buyer interest that we are seeing today.
How would you categorize the current state of this market?
We would say that the SCM BPO market has two is defined by two key and in some ways conflicting traits. On one hand it is a very nascent market where the potential for impact in the enterprise and for revenue for Service Providers has barely been scratched. On the other hand, SCM BPO is one of the most advanced of all the BPO offerings in the market as it can combine business outcomes based contracting, deep analytics in delivery, collaborative partnership based solutions, large scale process transformation and the use of significant technology components as well. In fact we see SCM BPO as one of the best examples in practice of what we have been calling “progressive operations”. It really can be leading edge service delivery but as we said it’s still a small market, with relatively few RFPs and minimal involvement of sourcing advisors. Once it gets better known and the case studies from clients get more attention we believe that this is a market which will really take off in the next few years.
And how did the Winners Circle shake out?
There are four service providers in our SCM BPO Winner’s Circle: Accenture, Capgemini, Entercoms & HAVI Global Solutions. We found four things in common across these service providers:
– Strong consulting and analytics capabilities;
– The deployment of visibility or Control Tower platforms;
– Great account management capabilities as validated by clients; and
– Deep reference examples of clients who have been through a journey of SCM transformation together with these service providers that they couldn’t have done on their own.
So what are your key takeaways from this study?
We think there are four key take aways from this Blueprint study on SCM BPO. First, is the uniqueness of SCM BPO by comparison to other horizontal BPOs. Second, it is about the market potential and relevance across industries of SCM BPO. Third, is the current heterogeneity of capabilities and strategies across the SCM BPO service providers profiled. Finally, it is about the capabilities required to be successful in the SCM BPO market today.
Lets discuss each of them separately:
1) The SCM BPO market is unique as it impacts COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) while the other horizontal BPOs primarily impact SG&A. In SCM BPO, there is competition not only from the other SCM BPO service providers but also from diverse set of providers such as IT Firms, software firms, consulting companies, 3rd party logistic (3PL) firms, firms with integrated supply chains, reverse logistics and/or firms willing to carry inventory costs and infrastructure. In this mixed environment, it is the role of the SCM BPO providers to better defined the client problems and possible outcomes and then bring together an ecosystem of all these various components to create the solution. As a result, partnerships and partner management is of greater importance in this area of BPO than pretty much anywhere else we have looked. What also makes SCM BPO unique is that having a distributed geographic delivery footprint is not just about cost savings or follow the sun processing but a key part of delivering what in many cases are still very physical and localized processes.
2) Since SCM BPO directly impacts COGS it means that the potential addressable size of this market is even at conservative estimates huge, on the order of about $3 Trillion with a related process cost of say $300 Billion annually. Based on our current estimates of the market, BPO Service Providers are delivering perhaps $1.5 Billion in services so around 0.5% of total potential just in BPO and 0.05% of enterprise related cost.
3) Amongst the service providers we have profiled we see four different segment which creates this heterogeneity in approaches to the market. We see there being: consulting solution based service providers, specialist service providers, pure play BPO service providers and large IT services companies. Even within these segments we see significantly different areas of focus by service provider and strategies which at this nascent state of the market are unique to each. Therefore as a potential buyer of SCM BPO services, it is incumbent on you to look at all these different approaches and talk to the service providers to understand their vision for the processes and capabilities as this isn’t a market where you will see near identical bids across a range of service providers in response to any RFIs/RFPs you release.
4) If we have to pick one essential capability required to be successful in the SCM BPO market today it will be the availability of analytic based consulting capabilities on top of transactional service offerings. All of the service providers in our Winner’s Circle have these capabilities. It is because of the collaborative, analytic based business outcomes oriented model for SCM BPO that we really see this as one of the clearest expressions of what we have termed at HfS as “progressive operations”. SCM BPO really can be one of the offerings that sets the path for the other parts of the BPO marketplace to follow.
What are some trends you are seeing in SCM BPO offerings and what should we be watching for in next few years?
The biggest trend is SCM BPO service providers acting as collectors and commentators on the vast variety and volume of supply chain related data that is being created. BPO Service Providers are using this data in two different ways today. First, they are using the data in near real-time to identify weak links or problem areas in the supply chain by implementing visibility platforms, dashboards and Control Towers and wrapping those with insightful analytical teams. Second, they are using the data with consulting and process excellence teams on a project basis to drive better decision making outside of the real-time interactions.
Going forward we should be watching for even more rapid growth in the volume and variety of this data as it gets fed by even larger and more detailed streams from telematics, machine to machine interactions (M2M) the internet of things(IoT) and by social media commentary from users of the products in the supply chain. SCM BPO can be a capability to not just analyze the data and drive better discrete decision making in the process but as it integrates with product development, it can be at the intersection of value creation as we bring together the product development cycle with insight from product performance in the field, reliability data and insight from the operation of after market services processes. This is one dynamic area and we want to show how this is evolving by also looking at the inter-related engineering services market later in 2014.
Over the next few years, we believe that SCM BPO will be one of the fastest growing and ultimately largest markets in BPO and as that happens and more service providers develop their offerings in this space we should expect to see a lot more M&A activity as the race to scale and differentiated capabilities takes root.
Thanks for taking the time to learn more about SCM BPO and we look forward to more of our continued coverage on this evolving market in the coming months.
HfS report authors Charles Sutherland (left) and Pareekh Jain (Click to view bios)
HfS subscribers can click here to download their copy of the 2014 Supply Chain Management BPO Services Blueprint Report
One of the trends we’ve been seeing with the proliferation of independent analysts, bloggers, consultants, journalists and other pundits, is for many of these characters to launch their own “firms”, when the product is, really, just them. Or them and a few freelancers they could tack on to their website to make them look like an actual company of people.
Now, if an individual was actually planning to grow a company over time – and genuinely adding real staff which does more than organize their mailshots, calendar or spell-check their reports, they can be forgiven, however, there are far too many people out there masquerading as company CEOs when they really don’t have a “company” to run. It’s just them. And some freelance admin person.
When I saw my old friend, Chris Lewis, announcing an exciting conference “The Great Telco Event” he is running in London this November, I was amazed at the sheer number of “companies” I have never heard of from a pretty impressive collection of individual speakers (many of whom are telecom analysts who found themselves going independent after that market commodotized and their firms couldn’t make enough profit out of them). Now, I have heard of most these experts as individuals, but these weird company names? I mean, why bother? Aren’t they just confusing their clients and prospects?
Aren’t we in a new generation of individuals promoting themselves? Isn’t the real brand equity in their personal brands as opposed to some obscure name they trumped up? And credit to Chris – one of the great all time telecom analysts, who has recently branched out as “Chris Lewis Insight“. Now… when prospective clients want to hire Chris, they want him and his services – and his handsome face. So why not brand his venture under his own brand?
“But didn’t you do the same thing Phil?” I hear you ask…
Kind of – I wanted to use a successful blog as the initial platform to grow a research firm, and that is exactly what we achieved, and it quickly culminated with us abbreviating the blog name to HfS to sound more corporate (try getting meetings with CFOs when your firm is called “Horses for Sources”). My friend Ray Wang had a vision of assembling a “constellation” of star analysts, and that is what he has achieved with some great additions like Holger Mueller and Peter Kim at Constellation Research. Now, if myself of Ray had never actually bothered to build genuine companies of experts, we should just call ourselves “Fersht Inc.”, or “Wang and Assocs LLC” (or whatever). And if the whole of HfS decides to quit on me tomorrow and I decide I can’t be bothered to replace them, I’ll probably do just that!
The Bottom-Line: We’re in the era of creating our individual personas – it’s time for people to exploit that
When you go on LinkedIn these days, it reminds me of those market scenes in historical movies and paintings, where people are selling their services and wares openly to all the town (B2C) and the other merchants (B2B). People are marketing their skills and competencies before their corporate identity. In fact, I find I have to click on someone’s actual profile and scroll down a couple of screens to find out who employs them these days. Who cares if you are an SVP at Blah Blah Bank… I want to know what you’re good at! And on twitter, many people do not even bother to add their company name in their profile at all.
I believe careers are now going in that direction – corporates want to reduce their core and contract for expertise as and when they need it. At the same time, an increasing number of individuals are shunning the corporate treadmill to enjoy the fruits of being self-employed – either as themselves or their pretend company. And those individuals are picking up new skills – often without realizing it – that makes them more valuable professionals – they learn how to market themselves well, how to hustle for clients, how to think outside of the box, how to differentiate their ideas and personas…
We can lament the shortage of Digital talent within corporations, but maybe that’s because the next wave of “Digital” skill and creativity is coming from outside of the creaking corporate firewall.
Outsourcing: Making the same mistakes over and over and expecting people to stop moaning
One of the the core issues we discussed at last week’s Blueprint Sessions was the frustrating and seemingly never-ending issue of providers over-promising delights to clients to win engagements and then failing to deliver on them. However, the group of 45 industry stakeholders all agreed that all of the entities are at fault in setting up too many of these engagements to fail:
Buyers: Thinking that they are going to get wads of free transformational consulting that will miraculously appear from the provider – even thought they haven’t actually paid for any;
Providers: Promising wads of free transformation consulting to augment their operational obligations, even though they probably will not really give the client any (but who cares, as it’ll be too late for the client to back out in two years’ time and they aren’t contractually obliged to provide it);
Advisors: Strong-arming providers to respond to RFPs in three weeks and allowing very little (if any) interaction time for providers to interact with their clients in advance to develop the right solution and get a stronger balance between delivery capability and desired outcomes.
So what happens when you look at a culmination of many buyers’ first five years’ experiences after signing a contract? Let’s take a look at some collective journeys:
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Four steps this industry needs to take to avoid engagement failure in the future
1) Less focus on the deal, more on the relationship. Providers are all-too-frequently being forced in the position of saying what they need to win the deal, as opposed to having a structure to propose a realistic partnership that works for both sides, with specific milestones and balanced delivery expectations.
Possible Solutions: Advisors need to create a more collaborative RFP process that allows for more interaction between the buyer and interested providers. Advisors also need to set better expectations for their clients and potentially get their governance consultants involved earlier in the down-selection process. In addition, providers need to take a stronger look at how to develop their existing clients – and view them as future growth opportunities, as opposed to always chasing that next deal simply because there’s more immediate money on the table, which means more consultative account managers and less out-and-out salespeople.
2) Buyers need to get real proof-points on provider culture, performance and capability. Buyers need access to pragmatic experts who talk to a multitude of peers in other organizations in order to get a stronger view of the post-transaction performance of providers. Simply relying on the rose-tinted references ponied up to the advisor, or reading inaccurate analyst reports (usually premised on rose-tinted client references) isn’t going to give them the accurate expectation of what they are likely to experience down the road with each provider.
Possible Solutions: Buyers need to do their own research and exploration and use the expertise of advisors and analysts to validate their strategy. Talk to other buyers, go to conferences, seek them out on social media groups. Ask advisors and analysts to make introductions to other buyers, and if they can’t do that for are probably wasting their money on them. Buyers should also try to hire at least one inhouse expert to work with the internal and external parties to add a dose of realism and experience to the whole process – there are plenty of experience experts in advisors/providers shops who are interested in getting off the road to get some buyside experience.
3) Early exit provisions should be implemented as an insurance from “value disappointment”. There needs to be smarter forethought in the whole process where the buyer and provider prepare in advance for failure to meet expectations. Outsourcing relationships need to be marriages with pre-nups. Providers really do not want miserable clients and buyers need providers prepared to invest in them, or give up trying to outsource, as they clearly aren’t cut out for doing it properly.
Possible Solution: If providers are being shoe-horned into responding to a price-squeezing, innovation-sapping relationship, there should be an early exit provision for both sides (for example after 36 months). If the relationship isn’t working – it probably makes sense for both sides to exit quickly, cost-effectively and painlessly.
4) Buyers need to recognize the profession of services and sourcing governance. After seven HfS summits, we can declare officially that most corporate staff have little knowledge of understanding of what services and sourcing governance people do and why they matter (or even exist). In fact, we estimate that 90% of employees are ignorant of the role and value a services governance profession provides – or should provide. Until services and sourcing governance is recognized as a crucial professional discipline, we are going to continue to be an industry struggling for an identity littered with flawed relationships and ignorant perceptions of what we all do.
Possible Solution: Appoint a Chief Services Officer (CSO). Many CPOs are proving ill-equipped to manage services governance, so surely its time for smart organizations to create the CSO function, with a direct reporting line to the top of the company? It’s hard to convince top talent to work for buyer governance teams when they are submerged 4 layers down the organization form any decision-making authority. With the concerted move to increase investments in offshoring, shared services and outsourcing, not having an empowered senior corporate officer responsible for transforming operations is lunacy for so many of today’s organizations.
The Bottom-line: If we are to survive as an industry, we need to stop making the same old mistakes
Didn’t Albert Einstein* once say: “The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results”. Then, surely, it’s time for the industry formerly known and “outsourcing” and now known as many different things (including outsourcing), started to change the way it operates. Providers need to get focused on making their existing business really shine, buyers just need to take control and dictate what they expect and then figure out how to realistically get it, and advisors need to focus on more than forcing nice-priced deals frosted with bullshit.
*Most people will attribute this quote to Albert Einstein but there is no evidence to suggest that he made this statement. Current consensus is that it came from the author Rita Mae Brown in her book Sudden Death, but we needed to find a cheesy way to tie Albert to outsourcing, so there you have it…
As we digest the incredible dialog from the HfS Cambridge University blueprint summit this week, the overwhelming mood from enterprises is one of frustration to get beyond this tactical status quo of legacy operations, in which so many find themselves wedged.
And most services providers aren’t going to come to the table with the technology and talent until their customers clearly dictate and demand what they need to cross this chasm. And those providers which simply do not have the Digital capabilities their clients demand to address these gaps, run the risk of being relegated to the class of legacy staff augmentation provider that performs only the low-value grunt work, or ditched from many client provider rosters altogether. And this is already happening with some ambitious determined clients.
When we surveyed 312 enterprise buyers on their two-year expectations from their current outsourcing relationships, it becomes abundantly clear that those desired business outcomes from yesterday’s outsourcing era have quickly become today’s table-stakes:
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Clients are rapidly losing patience with services providers that aren’t working proactively with them to provide more value than the basic terms of the original contract. I feel like we’ve had this conversation before, but this time many clients are doing a lot more than having a quiet moan that they aren’t really getting value beyond very basic service provision. This time, many are actively looking to fire their provider if they cannot get past operational teething issues and actively begin the process of transforming the way they do things. In so many instances, clients are beginning to doubt their current provider actually has the skills or acumen that they were promised during the early courting days prior to contract signing. In today’s climate, close to a quarter of clients will actively seek to eject their current provider if they have not effectively helped them standardize, automate and transform their processes within the next two years. This is no longer about achieving significant cost reduction targets and getting basic tactical operations functional – it is about moving clients into a future state that is much more effective than the current one.
The focus on Digital outcomes has dramatically emerged, with many clients increasingly no longer viewing tactical success as their end-game. Whereas, in years gone by, the focus was slowly shifting from cost reduction to better global scale (see our 2010 study), the onus on clients to move the conversation to one of better analytical capability, more savvy and creative support talent, access to better tools and tech, has leapt onto the table: these are the new stakes. While most providers will not get fired today for Digital failure in the short-term, it is already very clear that an increasing majority of enterprise clients expect their providers to bring these skills to the table. 60% already see operational analytics as very important as an outsourcing outcome, and a similar majority are already expecting their providers to pony up savvy talent and better tech within two years.
The Bottom-line: Innovation is now defined and most clients know what they need. Providers have to step up if they want permission to play in the next phase of this industry
Remember all those fantastical debates about “What is innovation and how can I get some?” Well, the answers are now unraveling and it’s becoming clear how both buyers and providers can be successful in the future – and how they can also maintain the status quo and risk being relegated to the detritus of legacy operations. Clients no longer yearn for transformation of processes, reduced costs and flexibility of global scale – because that’s what most have already bought and paid-for. Hence, those not getting these outcomes today are not yearning, they are feeling duped and let down – and know they are failing and going down on their provider’s sinking ship.
The table-stakes of 2014 are now a must-have for clients which have their eyes firmly planted on what they need to achieve in the medium and long term. They want providers who know how to engage with them to help them get to the next level. However, too many of today’s providers have lost interest in their clients once they have reached an operational steady-state – and are constantly laser-focused on winning that next deal, as opposed to fixing their existing ones.
Until our industry takes the painful steps to fix the current legacy it has created, many will likely fail in creating a new era of Digital services. This means both clients and providers need to invest in the skills and tools they need – and recognize that failure to do so will likely result in their ultimate failure to drag themselves out of operational low-value purgatory. In addition, intermediaries and advisors need to stop forcing these deals to get done in three-week RFPs so they can walk away with their fees paid with little care for what that client and its provider really achieve down the road. We all need to focus on planning and investing in the long-term future and not solely on the quick wins staring us in the face near term.
It’s official: outsourcing is not dying – it’s simply become a key part of a broader enterprise operations strategy: Integrated Global Services. 312 buyers recently shared their investment intentions over the next two years during our 2014 State of Outsourcing study, conducted with support from KPMG, and their operations strategy clear: one in four are reinvesting heavily in their global shared services operations, while seven-out-of-ten are continuing to make (largely moderate) investments in their outsourcing delivery.
The long and short of this is that 93% of enterprises today have shared services and 96% are outsourcing some element of their back office IT and business operations, while 27% are actually reducing their investments in their own internal business units. What’s more, 56% are already increasing investments in their centralized hybrid governance function to manage their mix of service delivery models. To this end, the increasing majority of enterprise buyers today are investing in an integrated global services model that orchestrates their process delivery across all available vehicles of sourcing:
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Let’s delve a bit deeper here and view how these investment intentions have shifted over the last three years, comparing this with the 2011 and 2013 State of Outsourcing studies:
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Shared Services makes its strongest re-emergence as a delivery model for a decade. While the broad number of firms increasing their focus on both the outsourcing and shared services models is relatively consistent over the past 3 years, the difference today is the intensity of investment. Outsourcing has slowed to a more moderate pace, while a number of large-scale enterprises are focusing on moving more work into their internal shared services centers – the first time in a decade we are really seeing shared services making a reemergence of this magnitude.
Buyers are shifting more of their higher-value work into their offshore shared services operations. It’s become abundantly clear that buyers are now aggressively globalizing their operational strategies and are leveraging their offshore shared services centers, almost as much as their outsourcing providers, as they seek to move more work from their internal business units into an integrated centralized services delivery model. As our previous post from the 2014 study emphasized, close to 3-out-of-10 enterprises are increasing the offshore component of their finance and accounting, over the next year, into both their shared services and outsourcing operations, while similar trends are occurring across IT, procurement, HR, industry-specific and customer service functions. From our discussion with multiple buyers of late, many are moving much of that next wave of business processes into their offshore shared services that require a greater deal of context and specificity to their own businesses and, in many cases, compliance requirements.
Providers need to earn the trust of their clients in order to take on higher value processes. In many cases, providers need to prove they have the capabilities to move beyond highly transactional processes before their clients will trust them to take them on. We will discuss this dynamic further in our next post on the study, but far too much outsourcing today has struggled to delivery value beyond transactional process delivery, usually because of the talent deficiencies on the buy side and mismatched expectations on the provider side, as buyer expectations evolve during the course of a relationship.
The integrated services model is going to force ambitious providers to evolve their capabilities if they want to survive in the long-term. The traditional global services model has evolved largely by transactional work being moved initially into shared services centers and buyers eventually outsourcing that work to providers as it becomes easier to “shift”, once is has become centralized into a smaller number of locations. Now a similar cycle could well be happening with middle and front office processes. However, as global management of integrated processes matures, and buyers become increasingly adept at developing their own offshore management competencies, it is not guaranteed that the majority of buyers will continue to look at the traditional outsourcing model down the road (and several are already evaluating their future sourcing strategies).
In short, there are multiple levers now available to clients seeking greater productivity and value, such as SaaS-based business platforms, high-value analytics tools and skills, better automation and robotization of their processes, and simply hiring their own offshore teams to do the work, as opposed to paying the (often higher) rates of the providers. Hence, those providers which are getting ahead of the disruption curve and supporting clients with more productivity tools and capabilities beyond simply offshore arbitrage and process standardization (read earlier post), are the likely winners down the road as clients integrate their global services delivery.
The Bottom-line: Outsourcing is teetering at a crucial juncture between providing genuine value and low-cost staff fungibility
In today’s global operations environment, many buyers are getting smarter and figuring out they can do a lot more themselves. Many are evaluating the potential of new tools and technologies, niche provider capabilities and managed governance services as vehicles to find new sources of value. While there are clearly several more years of productivity improvements to be made simply shifting work to lower cost locations and tweaking processes, eventually buyers will have to transform their current operations model from the status quo of today.
Simply plastering more and more lipstick on the same old pig is eventually going to fail for many, and transforming the global operations model into an integrated range of services, underpinned by cloud-based platforms, plug-and-play digital capabilities and supported by teams of innovative and analytical staff is the promised land most ambitious clients yearn to (one day) find for their organizations.
Providers need to prove they can do more than basic operations, otherwise outsourcing runs the risk of becoming a staff augmentation model for flexing operations as opposed to a strategic partnership between provider and buyer that can add more skill, technology and analytical capability for clients.
