If you wake up looking like this…

Don't go to work!

Posted in : Absolutely Meaningless Comedy

Anyhow, come and meet a compeling line-up of speakers, panelists, hobnobbers and politicians that include several outsourcing PMOs (for some strange reason they managed to attract several from beverage producers…), former senator John Sununu (one of the five panel members responsible for the oversight of TARP funds), a bunch of advisors, service providers and some crazed blogger.

As usual, a large discount is offered to the cheapskates who visit here, so click on the icon to the left to register quoting the code "FERSHT2".  If you are on the buyside and evaluating BPO strategy, drop me a note.

Posted in : Outsourcing Events

So Dell finally made its major play into the IT services enterprise arena announcing a $3.9bn deal for the Texas-based Perot Systems.  Unlike the HP/EDS mega-merger of last year, there is a lot less overlap between the merging entities, however, you have to assume this is more of a play by Dell to transform its commodity hardware business by refocusing its future strategy on services-led engagements.

However, while there isn't much overlap, there also isn't a lot of synergy.  Why should Perot customers want to buy Dell equipment all of a sudden?  Most CIOs today are looking to move away from hardware-centric IT delivery models, and onto more on-demand cloud computing models.  If anything, it's more of a play for Perot to push services onto Dell's customer-base.  It also opens up the lucrative healthcare IT market to the newly-merged entity.

While I applaud a bold move by Dell to transform its business model, work has yet to be done to elevate Perot's IT/BPO services business to the top echelon of service providers at a global level.  Namely, Perot hasn't  yet fully exploited its presence in healthcare to position leading edge IT/BPO offerings in that space, especially with the market ripe for exploitation in light of the new government initiatives, namely ICD-10 compliance and digitization of patient records.  If Dell can quickly leverage this merger to make a further strategic acquisition in this space, then you can see a new player emerging.  However, if they spend a whole year trying to restructure these firms and take their eye off the ball with regards to broadening the service offerings, this could present a window for several of Perot's services competitors in the healthcare space to step in…

You also have to wonder whether the largely US-dominated vendors are going to continue to consolidate in light of fierce competition from the Indian-dominated global providers.  ACS-CSC anyone?

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

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Posted in : Uncategorized

Mark Stelzner roused some passions last week with a great blog post discussing how some traditional media are highlighting the need to regulate bloggers with possible "conflicts of interest".  For example, Workforce Magazine's online article discusses the impact of controversial HR bloggers, such as Cheezhead's Joel Cheesman.

At the heart of the debate are the issues surrounding which industry entities are more credible for regaling information to the marketplace.  My take is that

everyone has potential conflicts of interest, and blogging has leveled the playing field across industry entities (journalists, consultants, analysts / marketeers, vendors and buyers). 

While, in the past, analysts and journalists ruled the roost when delivering controversial and impactful information to the world, the new crowd of industry bloggers are taking their share of the spotlight, once they have successfully leveraged their industry network into a social-media setting.  And while there is a real case to be concerned about the odd manipulative blogger furthering their own specific agenda, my take is that we're in a new media world, where bloggers are earning trust and credibility over time with their respective audiences.   Let's be honest here – every corner of the industry is potentially conflicted – here are some examples:

1. Magazines which sell advertising space to vendors adjacent to favorable articles that hightlight their products and services.  This has been commonplace for decades;

2. Analysts that produce case studies, or favorable write-ups, of their paying vendor clients (gasp!);

3. Consultants that take money from vendors for consulting or research work, and still run vendor-selection evaluations that involved those from whom they take money (shock! horror!);

4. Vendors which leverage compelling rose-tinted content to sell their own products (how could I dare suggest that?);

5. Buyers that have been influenced by their own past or present vendor relationships and lack a broader view of their industry (c'mon… we've all seen this). 

Bloggers are appearing from all these five mediums, and it doesn't matter so much what they do for a day job – what matters is the credibility and style with which they deliver their blog-talk.  For example, when I began this blog, I worked for a management consultant, and since switching over to the analyst world two years' ago, have seen very little difference with the audience regularly visiting here, or the tone of debate.  If anything, working for a reputable analyst brand can sometime hold you back from far-reaching opinions, if you're not always backed up by some sort of datapoint.  

Most successful bloggers today seem to be coming out of consulting businesses (for example Deal Architect, Human Capitalist, Inflexion Point, Software Insider and SpendMatters) than any other business.  The next challenge is for some of the leading minds in vendors to use the blog-platform more effectively to air industry issues, not to mention experienced practitioners.  If anything, vendors are the least conflicted, as you know exactly what their agenda is.  When dealing with other entities, their agendas are not always so obvious, and you just have to roll with your own trust of the writer.

All-in-all, the judgment over the credibility of a blog is tied more to that individual airing his/her views, as opposed to their day-job. If a blogger is judged to be overly-biased, or obviously conflicted, other bloggers are always quick to point this out and challenge that blogger's credibility.  Credibility is in the eye of the beholder, and bloggers who've earned their chops put theirs' on the line every time they post.

Posted in : Social Networking

One of the most prominent industry analysts in sourcing over the last decade-plus has been Stephanie Moore.  Steph started out at Gartner, before spending time at Giga, and most recently Forrester Research, where she built an industry-wide reputation as an outspoken and respected figurehead of the IT services and outsourcing world. 

Earlier this year, Steph made her first venture over to the service provider side, and when she's not busy entertaining her three kids, sailing around the Westport beaches, or regaling stories of her junior golf open triumph (she swears they had color-TV back then…), Steph assumes the role of Chief Marketing Officer for IT services firm, UST Global.  I thought I'd take this oppountunity to grab a few words with Steph to share some of her views on where the industry is headed, and how she's finding life on the vendor-side of the fence…

PF: Stephanie, how has the world of offshoring changed over the last decade?

SM: Phil, it has changed dramatically. In 1999, people were using offshore outsourcing to save money, but also to execute on very low-value tasks. There were also a lot of people scrambling to fix the Y2K problem. Today, it couldn’t

be more different. People are using offshore outsourcing for absolutely everything. It isn't even thought of as offshore outsourcing any more, it's simply global sourcing. Whereas ten years ago talking to a CIO about outsourcing was a little bit "bleeding edge" and a bit politically incorrect, today it is an imperative. Every Fortune 500 CIO understands the benefits and risks, and whether or not it makes sense for them.

The other major difference in the last decade is the customers, who have become unbelievably sophisticated. The sourcing and vendor management executive—a role that did not exist ten years ago—has emerged as an extremely important person within most Global 500 IT organizations. Those folks understand how to manage vendors. They understand how to write contracts, and they understand what structure needs to be put in place within their companies to make outsourcing work. So not only has the perception of offshore outsourcing changed, but both the vendors delivering services and the customers buying services have matured very dramatically.

PF: Would you say the day of the offshore captive is now over, or can you see this revitalizing in this post-recessionary market?

SM: I would say that the day of the offshore captive is over. As companies mature in terms of their outlook and understanding of outsourcing, they understand the benefits. One of the benefits is flexibility — flexible capacity and access to the very highly skilled technical resources that they may not have access to internally or may not need to staff internally. With a captive you don't get either of those. You also don't get predictability in terms of cost. A company with a captive in India for the past four-to-five years has seen their cost base rise and fall. Also, costs associated with training, recruiting, and marketing are really huge. Mature companies realize that it is much less valuable to invest in a captive, not only because of the hard dollars but because of the [lack of] ultimate value they are going to get from that captive. So as companies turn more towards outsourcing everything that is not core to their business and focus only on their core activities, the captive will become less and less attractive.

PF: How are your customers at UST Global approaching ITO today? Do you see any marked differences since the days before the economic downturn?

SM: If by ITO you mean IT outsourcing, then customers are continuing to be more selective in terms of the providers they use. They are unwilling to outsource everything to a single provider. They have sophisticated sourcing executives. They have more sophisticated internal business customers who understand that if they rely on one provider to support all of their applications and infrastructure, their leverage, negotiating power and service levels are more limited. The economic downturn has forced sourcing executives to be even more vigilant in terms of selecting the right providers for the right kinds of services and getting the right deal.

If by ITO you mean outsourcing in general, then obviously interest in outsourcing has picked up again, fairly dramatically, and I think where you see the real interest is the folks who have never done outsourcing before. When you look at financial services and insurance companies, for example, their consumption of outsourcing has slowed little bit as they begin to rationalize their spend and rationalize their internal IT costs. But folks who have never done any outsourcing before are realizing that this is a great way to save money, and they are more interested now than ever. So the short answer, Phil, is that the economic downturn has really spurred interest in outsourcing. That is the trend in general when the economy tanks.

PF: How can ITO providers differentiate themselves in today’s market? Is it by vertical focus, or other elements?

SM: That's a great question, Phil. Especially before customers get to know their service provider, the provider's vertical capability is absolutely the critical differentiator. That is what gives the provider the ability to convince the customer that they understand their industry, therefore they understand their systems, their needs, their requirements, and their specifications. I think that in some specific cases a service provider’s horizontal capability is important but just with customers with very leading-edge technology requirements, since most large ITO providers have a full complement of horizontal capabilities. But I think that once customers know their service providers, either through a very long RFP process or because they have worked with multiple providers for a long time, the largest differentiator is the vendor's ability to provide customer service, customer intimacy, and their ability to help the customer be successful. Without mentioning any names, the vendors who are the most popular and who have succeeded are those who can not only provide vertical domain expertise and horizontal technology expertise, but they have been able to embed themselves in the client environment and help their clients become successful; not only with outsourcing, but with their business strategies and business goals. Ultimately, that becomes the major differentiator.

PF : How about BPO – how do you see this market developing, and are you seeing the worlds of BPO/ITO coming closer together? Can you see more of the IT-centric service providers such as UST Global developing more BPO-centric services?

SM: That's another really good question. I think that as we get into the next decade, companies are realizing that technology is not as differentiating as we once thought it was. With the advances in bandwidth, we are going to see the cloud come into play much, much more. I think that if you talk to the analysts at Forrester or Gartner, they'll talk about the cloud and how everything is going to be in the cloud. Ultimately that is probably true, but I think that in the next five years or so, customers are going to get there through what looks a little bit more like PBO than like software-as-a-service. If you look at UST, for example, we have lots of customers for whom we do technology work: we support their applications, we support their infrastructure. We haven't really focused on BPO. Our small BPO division is specifically within financial services in the mortgage processing area. We have gotten into BPO in a rather large way, however, through our relationships with clients because they have said, "Look, you are supporting our applications, you are supporting our infrastructure, can you take over our business processes as well?" It's very opportunistic in terms of our approach but it is also very opportunistic in terms of the customer's approach. That is going to be more and more the future of the way IT services are delivered. Ultimately, the technology—the application, the infrastructure, and the processes—will be delivered through a cloud configuration, if you will. In the next five years or so, however, I think you are going to see business process outsourcing evolve to become more closely aligned to application and infrastructure outsourcing. So, yes, I do see a greater alignment of BPO/ITO, but not in the way that we traditionally thought about business process outsourcing three-to-five years ago when companies just outsourced all their F&A or outsourced their HR. I think ultimately that will have changed.

PF: And finally, after being an analyst for so many years, how’s life on the service provider side? What have you learned that has surprised you?

SM: – First of all, I love being on the service provider side, although it was something that I was a little bit nervous about. For such a long time, I really took great pleasure in helping both customers and vendors succeed in their relationships. So on the vendor side, I felt a little like I was going to the "dark side." But I must say that after six months or so here at UST I am so thrilled that I made the switch. In terms of things that I have learned, there is a lot about the vendor's side of the story and the vendor's positioning, but I have also learned even more how I can help make the customer and the vendor successful at their craft and execute on these deals. There is also much that I did not know as an analyst that I now know as a vendor. Ultimately, I think my work life is much richer by combining my experience as an analyst with my new experiences in the vendor world.

PF: Steph, thanks so much for sharing your views and experiences with us – and best wishes on the service provider side

Stephanie Moore (pictured) is Chief Marketing Officer of UST Global 

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

Being a relatively recent immigrant to US society, it's fascinating to observe the political games corporations and politicians play to reach their desired outcomes. 

What I find a little absurd is how easy it is to decipher the real political motives behind all the rhetoric; especially those ridiculous commercials sponsored by insurance companies trying to protect their monopolistic positions and keep their gravy-train chugging along.

Working in the sourcing industry forces you to cut quickly through complex issues to find sensible solutions, and healthcare doesn't seem a whole lot different – despite the sheer scale of the issues and requirements.  Trust me,

having spent most my life in the UK, government-owned healthcare is never the way to go.  A lot of my family work for the National Health Service (NHS), and the disorganized patient-service, layers upon layers of bureaucratic administration, waiting lists that would be unbelievably unacceptable in this country, create a very deep hole that is almost impossible from which to escape.  In fact, the NHS has been outsourcing like crazy the last few years as it tries to drive out cost and access skills it simply cannot develop itself.  It's become a gravy train for service providers and consulting firms alike – and even more of a cost-drain than many of the UK's other public services, which also pour out billions a year on back-office support.  The NHS can't even afford to employ specialist doctors in some areas because of recent budget cut-backs (something with which I have personal experience).

While this governmental cost-drain scenario is a highly undesirable outcome, so it the monopolistic outcome, which is currently plaguing the US healthcare industry.  Remember the old days of the telecom monopolies where the providers effectively set their own prices and created a whole gravy train of their own?  Remember when the airline industry only had high-cost travel options?  Even today I have to pay to watch re-runs of the Godfather on cable, despite shelling out $100 a month for their movie packages…

Back to the point of this post… how have large corporations been driving out cost, increasing transparency and competitiveness within their global sourcing models?   Not many use one service provider for all of their IT or BPO requirements – they create a competitive ecosystem and multi-source to competitive providers who fight for new projects and new contracts.  It keeps the suppliers on their toes, keeps prices competitive, and (should) help improve productivity as providers also compete on quality and outcome-based goals.  The key caveat is to ensure this ecosystem is managed effectively to ensure service providers are meeting quality standards, service levels etc.  A healthy ecosystem ofservice providers, eager to compete for business is creating downward pressure on prices, increased customer choice, and also a quality dimension where providers need to create more innovative customer offerings in order to differentiate themselves.

Seems to me the answer with the US health insurance providers, is to create a similar ecosystem where there are more providers in play, where they are held to certain standards, and are regulated with how they price their services.  Again, the caveat is to ensure this ecosystem is managed effectively.  If the government can help kick-start this ecosystem, them I'm all for reform.  There's nothing wrong with a government insurance alternative if it drives more competitiveness into the system, but the key is to create a competitive environment where the government only needs to step in to ensure everyone in playing by the rules. 

I'm excited to see how this will play out; breaking-down closed markets and monopolistic corporate behavior will do nothing but good for thehealthcare system that is crippling the competitiveness of US businesses today.  And if we need to train more doctors and nurses to support the millions of newly-insured, is that such a bad way to stimulate the US economy?  Seems to me that the healthcare industry is going to dominate global economies for decades to come, with the increasing cost of caring for elderly citizens, Alzheimer patients etc.  If the US can seize this reform as an opportunity to lead the world in medical research and healthcare practices, isn't this just the way to stimulate a tired economy?

Posted in : Sourcing Best Practises

The recession has upped the ante for today’s BPO providers: the move to providing business services in a cloud-like model is accelerating, and the real challenge for today’s service providers lies in answering the following questions:

1) Do we want to play in the BPO space? 

2) How do we play in this market?  What’s our angle?

3) How can we compete?  What’s our differentiation?

The challenge today is whether a provider is adding value beyond low-cost processing services.  If you are only really providing an arbitrage solution, someone is going to come along and offer it for even less money, and someone else will eventually come along and provide it for even less.  It’s a no-win game, unless you want to become the lowest-cost provider in town and make a razor-thin profit margin.

What’s interesting is this coming together of the IT/BPO model.  And it’s becoming much more sophisticated then simply providing a platform and some low-cost processing services.  It’s about  integrated business services where the provider delivers the hosting, the application skills and the business services needed to help clients achieve specific business outcomes.

IT services providers have made a living differentiating themselves by providing expertise in technical areas that allowed them to charge a premium to their clients.  However, as technical skills became a commodity, some IT services providers are moving up the value-chain by providing expertise that apply technical skills to specific business needs, while others have opted to scrap around for the low-cost “price per developer per hour” commodity business.  Those IT services providers which think they can get away with charging a premium for commodity development services are having a rude awakening in today’s post-recessionary marketplace.  Most clients today are insisting on greater transparency with the costs of services.

This is where BPO gets interesting, as the similarities are striking as services commoditize, and the winners focus on providing value.  Let’s take an example in life sciences:  an IT services provider is performing technical clinical data management services for a phama client.  This entails providing programmers skilled in integrating Oracle’s clinical data repository into the pharma’s legacy applications.  That pharma has five other IT services shops working on its systems, all of which can provide the same skillset to performthe same work.  It’s become a price-play.  At the same time, the pharma is spending millions a year on analysts to extract that data and apply it to research projects for new drug development.  If that IT services provider delivering the clinical data development work can step up and also provide analytical services to help interpret and apply that information to the pharma’s research operations, new business value is now being created (not to mention the huge cost-savings if these services are delivered offshore).

However, this isn’t about providing cheap bodies to crunch data, it’s about having systems analysts working in tandem with bio-informatics analysts to ensure the right data is being made available and subsequently analyzed for the pharma’s scientists to make critical judgment calls.  The differentiation is in providing the integration of technical capability, business process execution and then applying it to the client’s business.  Moreover, if the provider has performance-based incentives to help its client develop new drugs and achieve medical breakthroughs, it is becoming intrinsically tied to the success of its business.  This scenario is similar in other industries, for example merchandizing support for retailers, or supply chain optimization for manufacturers. This is where the whole IT services/BPO industry needs to go.

In Part II of this article, we will discuss how BPO providers can differentiate themselves by developing / acquiring IP to deliver holistic business services that integrate the application hosting, development and business processing within a single cloud-delivery model and then apply it to client situations.  And is there really a role for the pure-play BPOs, or is the power shifting to the IT services shops developing domain-specific industry BPO expertise?

Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Cloud Computing, IT Outsourcing / IT Services, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and BPaaS

Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch… Horses For Sources' official LinkedIn Group, the aptly-named "BPO and Offshoring Best Practices Forum" now has 7,000 members. This is a forum for leading sourcing practitioners to share their experiences, views, opinions, best practices and lessons learned in the worlds of IT Outsourcing, Business Process Outsourcing, Shared Services and Offshoring. You also get a free subscription to the Horses Digest. And it's FREE…

Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Captives and Shared Services Strategies, IT Outsourcing / IT Services, Social Networking, Sourcing Best Practises

Not too many service providers have had a bigger impact on the world of Business Process Outsourcing in recent years than General Electric’s former offshore captive, Genpact. And much of this rapid growth to a billion dollars of revenue and a global delivery network, can be credited to one individual – the tenacious “Tiger” Tyagarajan (simply known as Tiger to anyone who knows him).  And what an apt name for the wee fellow.

I can recall, just a few short years’ ago, when Tiger was fronting Genpact’s US business and taking on the major incumbent BPO providers such as Accenture, ACS, HP and IBM, with stories of Six Sigma excellence and Virtual Captives; dazzling firms such as Kimberly-Clark,

Wachovia and Cadbury Schweppes in the process. And when he’s not absorbed with cricket statistics

, or studying human behavioral patterns (don’t ask..), Tiger now spends his life on a plane somewhere en route to (or from) New Delhi, as COO of the firm.

I managed to pin Tiger down recently in a roof-deck bar in steamy downtown Chicago, where we engaged on some key developments in the BPO industry….

Phil Fersht (PF): Tiger, you’ve been in the F&A BPO industry since its inception – how has the industry changed over the last 5 years? How has the introduction of offshore delivery changed the dynamic?

Tiger Tyagarajan (TT): The overall Business Process Outsourcing Industry has changed dramatically in the last 5 years and within that clearly F and A has been one of the lead “engines “ of that change. I would characterize this change along 4 dimensions :

1. It is now part of every CFO’s thinking vs being a discussion only in select companies , this includes almost every industry , every geography and companies of radically different sizes

2. Global delivery is part of every such discussion , be it from China , Latin America , Easter Europe , India

3. The motivations have also changed from being just cost to leveraging talent , bringing in new expertise , domain knowledge and best practices , accelerating the journey to best in class

4. There is desire and vision to think well beyond just simple transactional work to complex work like Financial Planning , Pricing , Tax , Treasury and Closing and Reporting etc to name a few

PF: Do you see India continuing its dominance as the prime offshore provider of F&A, or do you see China, Latin America and other regions getting more in on the game in the future?

TT: Just in terms of “share of wallet “ India will continue to dominate amongst offshore delivery locations for F and A driven by 2 reasons :

1. English will be the dominant language needed and India has just an abundance of supply that no other country can match

2. Given the scale and maturity of F & A delivery and capabilities, India is in an advantageous position to deliver more higher-end decision making and analytical F &A work, and hence typically transactional will go with that.  However, as globalization continues one of the interesting dynamics is not dominance driven by scale but “criticality for Global delivery “ and here I think China is hugely important …. How can anyone claim global delivery and a global solution unless they are really strong and robust in China , particularly as Asian economies grow faster than other parts of the world and China continues to become an even more important player in the global economy

PF: What does the BPO industry need to do next to improve, both from the client and service provider standpoint?

TT: The single biggest issue the overall industry both providers and clients are grappling with is moving away from just pure cost as a single metric to being able to measure true effectiveness of processes and delivery and being able to create a roadmap and a journey to dramatically improve this effectiveness and outcomes of processes .

In some sense everyone is missing the “forest for the trees”.  Creating that shared vision, partnering on that journey and having the tools and methodology almost the “Science of processes “ is what is needed to get there

PF: We all understand the benefits sourcing advisors bring to the table when helping clients find a service partner, but can they change their approach to help their clients, beyond getting favorable contract terms for their customers?

I really believe it is important for the more progressive sourcing advisors to step back and rethink their role and the value they are supposed to bring to the table. Some of them tend to narrowly focus on short term favorable contract terms for their customers , but this is a business where impact is created through a long term partnership , through a journey to drive continuous improvement and most importantly through a roadmap to drive Process Effectiveness – not just efficiency. How can the advisors facilitate a process between a buyer and a provider in creating the right partnership model that makes it a long term Win Win for everyone. How do they tie some of their incentive structure to actually some of these goals being achieved ?

PF: Do you really see this merging of application and BPO delivery to create these “platform BPO” offerings, or is it more of an attempt by the ITO vendors to gain a foothold in the BPO market? How should the experienced BPO service providers approach hosting financial applications for their clients?

TT: My view is that “platform BPO “ is another jargon of the industry. Of course it is used as a way to compete by ITO providers , they have to compete that way they don’t have an option. However, the reality is that so many IT implementations have failed because the functional specs were wrong , or the process was broken and created defects , or people just bypassed the technology .

There is no question in my mind that the world and corporations have grossly underestimated the “Power of Process “ and for too long assumed that technology is the panacea of all evils. Sure, if those who handle a process also host the application then you can offer different pricing models such as “pay by the drink “ etc . But my point is that if the people implementing an Oracle or SAP or some other ERP know what causes suppliers to send bills in late , why customers sometimes do not pay their bills on time , what typically causes unreconciled accounts to buildup …. That is where value and success lies in that deep insight and knowledge around process knowledge

PF: Where do you see the industry moving next? Is KPO/analytics a reality in the near-term, or do you see the focus more on getting the basic processes right for a while longer?

TT: I believe that the more evolved providers are already using data and analytics to change the way processes and businesses run. We don’t call it KPO or analytics as we believe that it needs to be part of the process. Every day there is data flowing through that has the capability if analyzed of throwing up insights that can drive real business impact

Would it not be “cool “ to know the moment I have a customer invoice sitting unpaid as a receivable the following 3 things:

1. What is the probability that this customer will pay without a call

2. After how many days if he has not paid should he be called about it

3. What trends in the customer receivables and portfolio is one seeing in terms of risk and credit quality deterioration

And use all this insight to drive DSOs down and cash flow up

PF: And finally, your rise to the pinnacle of the BPO industry is unquestioned. What pearls of wisdom can you share for young executives today looking to build successful careers in BPO? Any specific training/experience they should look to get?

TT: Thank you , Phil you are being too kind !!

While it may sound clichéd, I am a passionate believer that to grow and be successful in this industry you need to have a real passion for the customer. You need to truly believe and start with the premise that they are always right. You need to find a way to weave this into your fabric as an individual, team and company.

The other recommendation I would have is that there is no question that you have to “be global “. Have you spent substantial time in Global assignments? Have you managed global teams ?

Finally, at some level you need to be an expert in some “domain “ , expertise area , industry . You have to be a thought leader . The earlier in your career one does it the faster one will rise later !

Tiger, thanks for being a good Horse – I am sure everyone hear appreciates your time to share your views on the industry.  Good luck with the cricket – just lose to England for once (please…).

NV “Tiger” Tyagarajan (Pictured) is the Chief Operating Officer of Genpact.  He is credited as one of the pioneers who transformed GE Capital International Services (now Genpact) into a high-end business services and technology solutions company with over $1 billion in revenues, which serves global enterprises in the banking & finance, insurance, manufacturing, transportation and business-services sectors.

Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Finance and Accounting, IT Outsourcing / IT Services, kpo-analytics, Outsourcing Heros, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and BPaaS