During this year’s NASSCOM BPO summit, we were subjected to a deluge of three-lettered acronyms which (let’s face it) aren’t particularly relevant today – as Pramod Bhasin so eloquently opined. And while “BPO” is clearly a broad and fluffy term that is now used to to describe any type of outsourced process solution that isn’t IT, “KPO” is even more vague. In fact, I discover a new firm daily which claims to have a “KPO” solution, ever since I invited every man and his dog to partake in my new research effort. And when you have the Chairman of NASSCOM asking “what the hell is KPO?”, you know there is a communication issue out there.
So why should we care?
Because “KPO” is truly the next phase of Business Process Outsourcing. Until now – and for a little while to come – BPO has represented largely transactional processes being offloaded to offshore locales with a service provider, sizeable employee remediation from the buyer, and quickfire cost-savings resulting. And if the service provider can muck through to some sort of adequate operating state within a couple of years, the engagement can be largely deemed a success. All-in-all, most firms have pretty much trimmed their payroll, accounts payable and customer service staff as much as they can feasibly manage, and once they have moved into a BPO engagement, this is normally the limit of savings they can hope to achieve from offshoring their transaction processes to a third-party provider. Within a couple more years, there won’t be many medium-to-large firms left which haven’t outsourced most of their transactional processes where is makes business sense to do so.
The next wave of savings will occur from buyers moving elements of higher-value processes over to third-parties, where onshore costs are high and skilled resources often scarce, in areas such as analytics, front-office finance, legal contract development, marketing, clinical data analysis, research and investment services.
Moreover, the manner in which this next outsourcing wave will happen is going to be different. Instead of broadscale employee remediation, buyers will take-on piecemeal services in relatively small initial projects delivered by high-qualified personnel, whose rates are still three times lower than the cost of using qualified onshore employees. And many buyers will not move immediately into multi-year outsourcing contracts, they will pay for these “PhD Services” by the drink – often weekly, monthly, or by the project.
Nervous CFOs, previously anxious about moving too much too quickly to an outsourcing provider, will be much happier to experiment with services they need, find a comfortable medium that works for them, and not have to make tough employee-remediation decisions off-the-bat. They can take their time, transition into an outsourced environment at a pace that suits them, and get access to the incremental talent that they need. Moreover, financial services firms, suffering from the credit-crunch, will be intrigued by this model, as they seek quickfire solutions to resolve resource constraints that do not require major surgery on their own operations. These guys are simply trying to get through their next quarter in this economy, and the thought of major multi-year commitments are simply indigestible for them in this climate.
This new model is beginning to have a significant impact on the way companies are sourcing services globally. And it will move quicker than we expect (remember F&A BPO). And it will threaten other incumbent services providers that deliver high-value business services. The leading consultancies better wise-up to this model, or they will find their share of the total knowledge-services pie being gradually eroded.
So the long debated and much anticipated saga of the Aviva BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) has finally been resolved, with WNS Global Services taking on a $1 billion contract to become the British insurance giant’s BPO provider of choice for the next 8 years. WNS will be assuming all of the current 24/7 Customer contact center work and some of EXL Service’s F&A work, with the latter’s contract remaining until 2012. This contract follows a storming 2007 for WNS, where the Mumbai-headquartered firm has made significant inroads into both financial services and retail sectors, in addition to its already dominant position in the airline sector.
Some key points
This deal will likely propel WNS close to a 10% marketshare for F&A BPO
WNS’s recent acquisition of BizAps gives the firm much-needed ERP enablement skills at a time the firm is making aggressive strides to compete for enterprise BPO deals – a key requirement
Not a vote of confidence for the much-vaunted BOT model for business processes – and Wall St. also seems to be going cold on BOT. It’s interesting that Aviva is electing to move to a straight BPO model at the same time it is expanding aggressively into the US domestic insurance market
WNS’s revenue has rocketed to $460m for fiscal 08 – a 32% hike over 2007, ever since our popular guest columnist Deborah Kops took over their marketing.
I was recently engaged in an excellent conversation witn Gianni Giacommelli, who leads marketing strategy for SAP’s BPO division, on the way forward for the Procurement BPO market. One of the aspects about SAP that has impressed me, is their strong view of BPO as a opportunity, as opposed to a threat, to their business. Gianni’s boss, Christain Baader, has performed an excellent job driving this strategy in recent years, and made his case-in-point last year where he discussed why technology is an important key to BPO-sustainaility. BPO is all about driving common strandards that can help service providers leverage their service staff and technology applications across multiple clients in a utility model. So what better opportunity is there to encourage enterprises to standardize on a common ERP archtecture than when they evaluate BPO opportunities for their business? And it’s not solely about BPO, it’s also about globalization: the more global enterprises can encourage their country-level businesses to operate within a global process template for functions such as finance, HR, sales and procurement, the quicker they can access critical data to make global business decisions. Without digressing further, I asked Gianni to summarize our conversation regarding the development of procurement BPO solutions, where many of the leverage points for cost savings are driven through process and platform optimization, and not solely labor arbitrage. Over to you Gianni:
Procurement outsourcing burst onto the business process outsourcing scene with great promise, but it has changed of face in the last two years. While early deals delivered tactical benefits such as procurement operations cost savings, many companies are still not realizing the more substantial advantages that can be gained. In early procurement outsourcing deals, service providers did not consistently manage to deliver more substantial spend-related savings. With the cooperation of clients, they need to complete designing and deploy integrated, end-to-end, sourcing-to-settlement procurement processes – and be allowed to contribute experience and best practices. At the very least, the provider should be able to bring in an infrastructure (i.e. a pre-configured best practices platform, ideally with some procurement-specific services on top e.g. level-1 support and supplier onboarding) that would allow the client to focus on executing seamlessly. Technology utilization has a key role here and, while theoretically understood, is often a contentious ground – and in our experience requires more than a “business as usual” treatment.
Realizing the Full Value of Procurement Outsourcing
Basics first – and a home truth: procurement outsourcing success requires the CPO, COO and CFO to do their part – collegially. The only way theoretical savings negotiated at the sourcing level (which is where often CPOs incentives are confined) can be turned into actual savings is 1) ensuring compliance within the client company and 2) ensuring the results can loop back into strategic sourcing where the observation of the actual company behavior (what is bought, when, where, in what sizes) can provide additional levers to the category managers. Most of the remaining savings come from controlling one-off purchasing and vendor payments and from cost avoidance as a result of demand management and reduced costs of enterprise procurement activities (this is where the CFO and COO typically have a say).
While companies can realize procurement outsourcing value by leveraging the provider’s economies of scale and labor arbitrage, process optimization (defined as processes and knowledge including securing category-specific knowledge and related usage) is the single most important lever. To maximize the impact of this lever a unified technology platform must support and consolidate sourcing and purchasing processes. A key aspect in securing procurement savings, compliance is ensured in the purchasing and ordering process. This can be accomplished by leveraging the use of procurement cards, approval and other workflows, as well as data analysis and reporting based on standard procurement reports within the business intelligence component. Strategic sourcing savings are obtained by enforcing stronger compliance, as the customer converts results from sourcing events into contracts and catalog items from which requisitioners can choose. Poor performance in activities such as one-off purchasing and problems like high costs of demand management and enterprise procurement activities (such as the cost of the procurement organization) can be addressed with internally hosted catalogs that contain only approved purchasing items (both goods and services) and respective vendor contracts.
Four years of experience in procurement outsourcing, two simple views
1) Providers that are striving to deliver optimum procurement outsourcing solutions typically offer processes based on best industry practices and – in order to achieve that – have realized the importance of strong relationships with the software suppliers underlying their offerings to ensure effective design and execution of service delivery. BPO-specific implementations are different from typical system-integration jobs (due to the search for replicability leading to heavier templatization and multi-client architectural choices). For this reason such collaboration must go beyond a simple joint go-to-market effort, and must encompass service delivery design – so that the solutions are deployed in a way that they address the business problem and they are cheaper to implement and run. As an example, SAP has signed such partnership agreements with Accenture, Hubwoo, IBM, Infosys and Quadrem and spends a significant amount of resources in those activities.
2) Customers that have achieved long-term benefits from procurement outsourcing are shown to be consistently open to using their providers’ standard processes and platforms. By doing so, providers can achieve the economic model they need to deliver innovation. Again as an example SAP has a few dozen customers operating on the basis of the BPO program and we continuously collect learnings from such experiences. The learnings are exceedingly interesting, and the sad truth is that – in the absence of such program – those experiences would be lost between (and within) BPO provider and software vendor
Gianni Giacomelli (pictured) is Director of global strategy and marketing for SAP’s BPO business unit. He previously worked as an outsourcing sourcing advisor for Everest Group in Europe..
There’s been a lot of noise in the market this week concerning the TSA’s award or their HRO contract to Lockheed Martin. While this is clearly a bold move into HRO for Lockheed, this isn’t likely to prove a major loss for Accenture. Why?
Times have changed for HRO. The initial contract was established in 2002 – a time when the HRO market was on a major upswing and the 9/11 attacks had put Homeland Security firmly under the microscope. While the Federal sector is clearly a crucial market for Accenture, you’d have to question whether Accenture would be so interested in Federal HR services in today’s outsourcing environment. With the presidential election looming and a possible de-emphasis on massive investments in Homeland Security, this sector is not as attractive as it once was for a services provider. Demand for application services is rampant, combined with some areas of BPO (notably F&A), where Accenture is a market leader. Add to this the fact that HRO has slowed and will take time to rebound, and you have to question whether Accenture is as motivated as it once was to invest resources into this area, when they have so many other growth opportunities. Their recent 20% revenue hike from last year and record quarterly revenues, coupled with further double-digit growth in consulting and outsourcing, are testament to the fact this company is firing on all cylinders.
The Federal Government sector isn’t primed for the traditional sourcing model. Most of the established sourcing advisors are not accredited to work with the Federal government (with the exception of Equaterra). Moreover, most of the Federal agencies use their inhouse procurement arms to evaluate those vendors on the accredited supplier list, and only use the traditional consultancies, which have Federal approval, for their sourcing decisions. Often this is not to the benefit of the outsourcing providers from the commercial sector, who are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the Federal Government procurement process.
It wasn’t as big a deal and many people think. While Lockeed assumes a new deal size estimated at $1.2 billion, Accenture’s previous tranche of the TSA HRO contract was far, far smaller than this ($214 million). It only handled the post-hiring employee support activities, benefits admin and payroll, while CPS Human Resources Services handled all employee-verification, recruiting and pre-hire activities and Avue Technologies the recruiting workflow systems.
For Lockheed Martin, this creates a great testbed to develop an HRO offering. Lockheed Martin is a well-respected government services provider. The firm clearly has its eye on supporting the Homeland Security Department’s headquarters operations. This could be up to three times the size of the TSA engagement and the sheer size of this engagement gives them the platform and resources to develop a competitive HRO offering. I’d be surprised if Lockheed has serious HRO aspirations outside of the government sector, although it’s not inconceivable it could compete for HRO contracts in the aerospace and hi-tech sectors. However, it will take time for the firm to develop a workable HRO model for the TSA that can be leveraged across other entities.
All in all, it’s refreshing to have new domestic entrants into this sector, in addition to the offshore giants, which has had its challenges in recent years, and it’s the end of a chapter for Accenture, which put a lot of effort into getting the TSA fully operation (not a simple task for any provider). It will be interesting to check back in with the TSA in a few months’ time to see how they are fairing with such a complex engagement.
I wanted to share an article from last year that discusses how enterprises today can better prepare their key staff for life after outsourcing:
The outsourcing debate over recent years has been dominated by the operational ability of companies to transition processes to a third-party supplier to manage. Too many companies have presumed their business will carry on as it was pre-outsourcing, but with third-party staff managing some of the business functions. However, in the majority of outsourcing efforts there is a degree of employee transition, and when this happens there are leading practices for both transitioning and restructuring the retained organization.
Experience demonstrates that those companies that proactively prepare their management effectively to:
(1) Modify their roles, responsibilities, and management styles,
(2) View outsourcing as a strategic tool,
(3) Learn new skills, and
(4) Change their daily routine…
…are those that are able to achieve value from an outsourced environment.
The full article is featured in Crossing media’s HROToday magazine, and can be accessed here
I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Kulwinder Singh, who heads up marketing for SatyamBPO in Hyderabad. It's great to meet a marketing guy who generally get's it. Check out how he placed a picture of Kishore Rao, SatyamBPO's Head of Quality, receiving a Six Sigma IQ Excellence Award on a giant billboard in New York's Times Square…
Mark Stelzner recently posted someinteresting statisticson the plummeting average tenure of C-suite executives:
CEO: A 2007 Harvard Law School study shows that a “manager CEO” of a S&P 500 firm averages 5.5 years of tenure. Crist Associates’ 2007 Volatility Report also shows the majority of CEOs with less than 5 years of service.
CFO: Spencer Stuart has CFO tenure at 4.3 years – and falling (Crist at 5 for all CFOs).
CIO: According to the 2008 State of the CIO poll results, a Chief Information Officer’s average time in seat is about 4.4 years, down from 5.1 years in the prior period.
CMO: Spencer Stuart’s annual study shows Chief Marketing Officers at a mere 26.8 months, which is actually up from 23.2 months in the prior year.
CHRO:Workforce Magazine’s analysis putting an average CHRO in their seat for approximately 3.1 years.
These stats got me thinking more about how organizations today are rethinking their organizational strategy in a challenging economy where talent management is ever-critical to the business, and non-core functions are becoming increasingly subjected to lower-cost outsourcing solutions. So why are C-suite tenures all getting shorter?
Marketing: is far too tactical in many organizations, and often a scapegoat for poor sales performance. Marketing managers are focused far too much on administrative tasks, such as distributing press releases, managing mailing lists etc. Refreshing the CMO every couple of years can add some gloss to the lipstick on that pig.
HR: like marketing, HR is often far too bogged down in administrivia such as benefits admin, compensation management and compliance. High attrition, low worker morale and a general lack of strategic involvement in the core business drives many CEOs to revolve the CHRO door every three years.
IT: until recently was a shining star in the company, but the prevalence of lower cost third-party services is rapidly transforming the role of the CIO from technology evangelist to cost-containment expert. Inability to keep costs down and failure to meet punishing deadlines is seeing the CIO’s tenure shrinking close to the four-year level.
CFO: Y2K, the dot-com bust a vicious 9/11 fueled recession, and now a credit crunch and a further economic squeeze has made the life of the CFO about as easy as being Elliot Spitzer’s publicist. Like their CEO bosses, the CFO is taking the fall every 5 years for poor financial performance.
In short, the support functions for a business are becoming increasingly less ingrained with core business strategy and revenue-generating activity. Effective business line managers are constantly becoming smart people managers; retaining and nurturing their talent which adds dollar-value to the enterprise is now a core managerial skill. They are also honing their ability to manage their P&Ls to further their careers and use front-office applications effectively to help drive their business forward. In addition, effective sales managers increasingly encourage smart, targeted marketing activities to generate new business opportunities; they know what their clients want and how to reach them.
As today’s enteprises become more global, they increasingly need to structure their core business units to push their products and services into new markets quicker than ever, with their cost of sales at a minumum. Developing talent, marketing to new customers and managing the finances are more important than ever to the global enterprise as they learn to become more nimble and competitive in this business climate. However, these real value-add activities are less frequently taking place in siloed HR, marketing and finance departments – they are becoming pervasive across business functions that are core to developing and running the business. Is this what is really driving BPO and ITO – the desire to drive out high-cost services that have lost much of their value to the enterprise? And are the traditional business support functions losing their relevance?
All-in-all, the business support functions need to be more closely aligned to the core business lines to add greater value to the business. So by shedding the routine low-value work, CEOs can focus their C-suite executives on driving better people-management, better marketing, better financial planning across their product and service lines globally and set performance metrics that hold them directly accountable to aligning their craft with corporate performance. And yes, tenures may still reduce even faster in the short-term, as support functions become more accountable for adding value to the business, but how else can you change executive behaviour?
I was a sad day this week then Lisa Ross announced that FAO Research is ceasing its operations. I have known Lisa for several years as a good friend, and have rarely met such a talented industry networker and marketeer with a strong perspective on the industry. Lisa has also guested here during the early days of Horses.
Lisa’s recent work bringing together the sourcing advisor and vendor communities in targeted forums created a platform for valuable industry interaction that only Lisa made possible. All is not lost, however, as she will continue her recently launched blog. Knowing Lisa, we will see her re-invented and re-energized in the not-too-distant future.
There’s been a lot of heated discussion in the outsourcing industry of late regarding the issue of lists, rankings, awards and proclamations of vendors, advisors, tought-leaders etc. As per expected, emotions are strained when some come out looking good, and some not-so-good.
However, with such a ramshackle swirl of information out there… from consultants, media, bloggers, analysts, associations, researchers, there has never been a more critical need for the ultimate target – the buyer – to have balanced, unbiased and accurate information and advice. The real issue here is that rankings or “best of” lists are only as valuable as the rigor and independence of the evaluation methodology.
Deborah Kops, who has guested here with some intriguing viewson outsourcing issues, has offered to share her thoughts with us on this whole issue. Deborah is widely recognized as one of the outsourcing industry’s most experienced voices, having spent the majority of her career on the advisory and practitioner-side of global services, leading global transformation efforts at Deutsch Bank and Bank of America, before helping to establish PwC’s outsourcing division. Today, Deborah is Chief Marketing Officer for WNS Global Services, a leading offshore BPO and KPO provider, and has greater exposure than most people in the industry to these “lists”, now she is leading marketing for a services provider with revenues of half-a-billion dollars. Over to you Deborah:
In May 2006, I published an article in Global Services magazine called “The Book of Lists.” A series of events drove me to take up a pen; I had recently served as a judge on several rankings, and had been amused that I was personally ranked a “superstar” on a list in a category that I in no way, shape or form could be termed an expert, even by my father who thought me a wunderkind.
The article seemed to have been overlooked by the chattering classes. I got no feedback and relegated the topic to my personal annals, thinking, “there I go again—seeing disconnects where no one else does.” And subsequently moving to the provider bench, I experienced the full force of “list mania;” the requests for lists and rankings were incessant, but I grumbled privately as I pushed my team to find the most arcane of data for every inquiry, concerned that missing the submission of even one application was the ultimate of marketing faux pas.
Now, two years later, the industry is all abuzz on the topic of lists. So I went back to that article to see if it still was relevant. I think it is.
Two years ago, I wrote about those determined to grab onto the global services delivery trend by pronouncing the definitive judgment on the industry’s best and brightest providers and individuals, identifying the latest trend or dimensioning the marketplace.
And I found, after reviewing what was then a relatively small group of list makers caught in the act, that, one list’s number four was another’s number 26. If in the variations within any crop of “global,” “best,” “emerging” and “top” service providers or advisors is any indication, beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder. And what is magic about being in the top 100 or five or 10 in a market as big and diverse as our global services industry?
We generally acknowledge the usefulness of lists. Lists give us a simple framework to evaluate relativity and test importance in an increasingly complex world. They can serve as an elegant communication tool by allowing us to compare, contrast, and prioritize a range of factors and opinions. But faced with all these lists, what is the business line sponsor or the corporate sourcing staff to think? Are these lists bogus exercises or helpful tools to evaluate the supply side of the services-delivery equation?
What do the lists tell us?
First and foremost, independent provider and advisor lists serve as a good public barometer of brand recognition and a market reflection of image in a relatively immature industry without one industry-wide voice, unlike the Royal Institute of Chartered Architects, or the American Medical Association. They are used as stand-in as the services industry’s only current broad indicator of brand value. As the industry matures, the use of scientifically-constructed and tested brand indices should become more common; however, at this juncture in services evolution, it’s about all we have to rely upon.
Provider claims of excellence or advisor claims of differentiated methodology can sometimes be supported by the independent opinion of third party lists, especially if the industry’s best and brightest are sitting judgment. While ranked lists are by no means scientific or purportedly meant as an endorsement, they are often used in collateral to provide seeming accreditation in an industry that has no common, recognized standards of excellence of its own at this point in its evolution.
Lists can uncover market trends. At their most useful, list makers may be comprised of industry watchers — journalists, consultants, advisors, buyers and academics — who look closely and thoughtfully at the applicants, trying to isolate new trends in service provision or employee management, allowing them to determine whether certain offerings are finally ready to meet with market acceptance.
Lists are also a gauge of marketing prowess. Honest list evaluators privately admit that the completeness of the applications and the quality of presentation, not to mention grammar, weigh heavily in the evaluation process. The ability to succinctly communicate a value proposition to industry insiders may be a good test of market positioning and messaging. If the insider gets the proposition, chances are that the marketplace might just understand the message, too. And for those lists that are styled as vox populi? Well, those are a reflection of marketing prowess, too. Some of us on the sell-side have the time and the wherewithal to focus on getting our clients and friends to answer questionnaires.
Lists both influence and reflect current industry values. Size and scale seem to matter. It appears that there is a direct correlation between service provider or adviser size and relative ranking on most of the lists, which include a best category, or are ordinal in evaluation. Over time, as provider and advisor track records become more transparent, and the industry really centers on what is a value proposition or whether the advisor’s deal was really well structured, rankings may imply other values.
Emerging offerings may first reach the buyer’s attention through the list process. As a relatively easy marketing and inexpensive marketing exercise, emerging or stage one outsourcers or advisors can avail themselves of an opportunity to broadcast the news of their process innovation or new approaches to delivery, judges permitting.
Over time, lists can serve as a good indication of the maturity of the marketplace. As new entrants and new offerings enter the marketplace, lists serve as a good archive of marketplace movement and development year-on-year. Over time, call it the ancestry.com database for the industry.
What Don’t the Lists Tell Us?
Read the methodological fine print if it is available. Although the data points evaluated may be substantial, not all lists are formulated based on the same or consistent level of rigor. Consider factors of sample size, statistical application, and criteria weighting. And realize that, human nature being what it is, each evaluator will bring his own personal biases for certain delivery strategies, provider profiles and approaches to the exercise. At the end of any judged exercise, for example, individual judges’ lists are assimilated into one publishable list, further adding a degree of whim, taste and fancy to the process. These lists are not the last word, but rather should be the first in selection.
A key component of editorial calendars and other sponsorships in the outsourcing industry, rankings and lists can provide a service to communities by identifying players and trends. But let’s not delude ourselves; they are also a business imperative for publishers, associations and pundits to build membership and/or circulation and sell adverts, publications and reprints, playing on the sell side’s need for recognition. They generally make someone money! This is not necessarily a negative, but is rather the way the world goes around. What’s critical is that that which is editorial and that which is financial should be kept completely independent at all costs. Pay for play in any form must not be the modus operandi.
And another problem inherent in list making is that the lists do not necessarily always evaluate the entire universe of sell-side providers or advisors. They often evaluate those who “opt in,” having deemed the application exercise a good use of marketing time and dollars to develop an estimation of market perception. Some providers and advisors determine that, for a range of business reasons, that inclusion is not beneficial at a moment in time because of business performance or the priority of other corporate events. Careful consumers of lists understand that the tallies are by no means exhaustive or inclusive of all offerings that may meet a corporate need, but merely serve as a boost to research.
The Effective Use of Lists…
In the right context, sell-side rankings can be exceptionally useful tools. Between all the lists, most providers and advisors — established and emerging — are covered, providing some of the initial legwork to identify the universe of players. This enables the quick assembly of a short list for further desktop investigation. The rankings can also softly suggest relative movement of the industry over time. As provider/advisor positioning changes, factors such as market size, buyer values and performance may be implied.
Sometimes corporate managers cross-reference their decisions through third-party opinion. Using a list to effectively support selection ex-post facto could be a good way to help outsourcing sponsors become comfortable with a value proposition or an advisor selection, especially when the consultant’s or provider’s brand is not yet a household name.
…And the ineffective use of lists
Now comes the rub. When I was younger and absolutely intransigent on most issues, the family retort always was ‘who died and made you queen?’ By extrapolation, who is to say that one list is the absolute authority on the industry best and brightest? Are the publishers, the industry pundits, the academics, the consultants the last word? Each of us can at best see only the smallest piece of the puzzle, and the “truth” we trumpet, whether backed by the numbers of ballots, or the experiences on which we base our opinions, is in the end only perception at a point in time.
Watching the debate in a range of media–blogs, articles, private conversations, and analyst calls– is certainly a distraction from the day-to-day hardships of this economy and this industry, but it takes me back to my school days, watching Tommy Brennan beat the dickens out of Karl Kurth on the playground of Cumberland School. At the end of the day, it’s a completely useless fight because of the inherent and unavoidable biases in lists— no matter how every list maker beats his methodological chest.
The only list which ultimately matters is the client’s own ranking of advisors and service providers. Factors such as process scope, geographic reach, value proposition, qualifications of the team customer approach and performance record…these are just a few of the criteria that drive evaluation. Best advice as when reviewing the growing crop of lists — each to his own.
Deborah S. Kopsis Chief Marketing Officer of WNS Global Services. You can email her direclty herewith your views on this topic, or discuss openly on this blog.
During this year’s NASSCOM BPO summit, we were subjected to a deluge of three-lettered acronyms which (let’s face it) aren’t particularly relevant today – as Pramod Bhasin so eloquently opined. And while “BPO” is clearly a broad and fluffy term that is now used to to describe any type of outsourced process solution that isn’t IT, “KPO” is even more vague. In fact, I discover a new firm daily which claims to have a “KPO” solution, ever since I invited every man and his dog to partake in my new research effort. And when you have the Chairman of NASSCOM asking “what the hell is KPO?”, you know there is a communication issue out there. 
I recently had the pleasure of meeting with Kulwinder Singh, who heads up marketing for 
