PULSE Magazine | IAOP's e-zine takes you deep into outsourcing with the latest ideas, advice, knowledge, and best practices, and turns the conventional upside down with stories designed to engage, inspire and challenge you. With editorial content from the leading thinkers and doers in the outsourcing industry, you’ll have the know-how, tools and resources to succeed as a new professional in today’s global economy.
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MOST POPULAR ARTICLES
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Certified Outsourcing Professional® (COP) 
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Reducing the Complexities of Scaling Ecommerce in China 3
View from the C-Suite: Rhonda Vetere, CTO, Estée Lauder Companies, Inc. 4
C–S–R You Ready? An IAOP Webinar 5
Innovation in Outsourcing: The Case of The Procter & Gamble Company 6
Show Me the Money 7
Key Components of an Outsourcing Agreement 8
The State of Tools & Technology in The Outsourcing Industry 9
Socially Responsible Outsourcing: Doing Good While Doing Well 10
The Rise of Legal Services Outsourcing
Third-Party Governance - What Good Looks Like | We can all agree that ‘good’ governance is important. In the highly competitive, rapidly changing, increasingly complex and risky business environment in which enterprises operate today, the need for ‘good’ governance has never been more acute. The larger the organization, the more diversified its business lines, the more geographically dispersed its operational footprint, and the greater the number and spread of their third parties, the more critical the need. But what does ‘good’ governance look like?
Over our twenty years in the sourcing advisory space working with hundreds of clients, Neo advisors have worked with only a few enterprises that have recognized this need and established a good governance program. In our experience, the vast majority today are lagging far behind this ideal. Often, we encounter organizations that have the bare minimum dedicated team and/or inadequate tools to support basic sourcing governance imperatives. Alternatively, we have worked with many clients that have invested in a governance function, unfortunately, its sole focus is on core transactional aspects such as contracting and performance monitoring. While this may be a good start, a good governance program needs to be much more comprehensive and robust. More »
Preparing for the Future of Talent | The potential ability of improving user experience (customers, employees, and ecosystem partners) impacts a company’s competitiveness in such a profound way that it is a do or die decision for the enterprises. However, despite their best intentions, 78% of the enterprises fail in their initial digital transformation efforts. Among those that succeed, it is a common refrain that it is talent – not technology – that determines success or failure of a digital program. Most leaders concede that technology implementation is the easy part; solving the talent and culture equation holds the key to digital dominance.
Talent may be one of several components that an organization needs to optimize to get digital right; however, as speed becomes the new currency for business (and, therefore, by extension IT), talent is increasingly becoming key to ensuring organizations are able to realize their digital ambitions quickly. The new IT model in a digital-first world is being redesigned to focus on IT services’ agility and flexibility with cost reduction as a logical/implicit derivative. This, coupled with external factors such as immigration reforms and the global geopolitical environment, is influencing enterprises to rethink their talent strategies and design talent models that support their transformation journeys. More »
Output-Based Pricing in Application Services: Adoption in the As-a-Service Economy | On October 17, Everest Group hosted a webinar titled, "Output-Based Pricing in Application Services: Adoption in the As-a-Service Economy."
Despite decades of outsourcing experience, pricing models continue to be input-based, leaving little to no incentive for the sourcing teams to change or for service providers to propose new options. As the inexorable march toward the as-a-service economy continues, the input-based model is increasingly less effective in some areas. An output-based services consumption model is better suited to the overall cloudification of the IT estate.
In this session, Everest Group’s Pricing Assurance team leaders explore adoption of output-based models and offer insights on pitfalls to avoid if you’re considering this approach. We also introduce the different output-based benchmarks we see being contracted in IT application services. More »
How to Create an Innovation Culture and Drive Superior Business Outcomes in Sourcing and Procurement | In our recently completed research into innovation in sourcing and procurement, we identified VSP Global as a Pinnacle Enterprise™ based on its outstanding outcomes and capability maturity. We had a chance to speak with Greg Tennyson, Head of Global Corporate Services, about the company’s innovation journey. Greg joined VSP Global nearly six years ago to lead the procurement and travel teams, and shortly thereafter began transforming his organization to focus on delivering business value through partnering with business and functional stakeholders. Due to his success, Greg is now responsible not only for procurement and travel, but also real estate and facilities, physical security, safety and distribution. He also serves as an advisory board member of industry associations such as Sourcing Industry Group (SIG) and ProcureCon, as well as procurement technology companies including Amazon Business, ScoutRFP, CXO Nexus, and FairMarkIT. More »
Sense of Urgency | Taking a genuine interest in another person, especially a client, means that you need to go the extra mile, be a bit vulnerable and transparent and most of all, behave in a manner that communicates that they are a priority. More »
Resolving Digital Dilemmas | The relentless evolution of opportunities and challenges presented by digital technologies, brings a corresponding business imperative for continuous digital transformation. But, the waves of disruptive change and the accompanying divergent choices they often present, can introduce unanticipated complications and uncertainties. We describe these as Digital Dilemmas. Businesses that understand the nature of these dilemmas and their options for resolution will be the ones that flourish on the journey to 2022 and beyond. More »
Agile Insourcing | A significant number of US based enterprises are bringing a portion of their outsourced work back into their internal technology function. At the same time, we are seeing significant growth in the nature and volume of work handles by 'captives' - a term spanning Global Inhouse Centers (GICs), Shared Services Organizations (SSOs) and Global Business Services (GBS) hubs. In our experience, the largest portion of thins 'insourcing' or reversal of past decisions to outsource is occurring by moving work to offsite captives with the remainder back to onsite locations. A considerable proportion of this insourcing has been centered around Applications Development. More »
Establishing a Strategic Business Case for Enterprise IT Automation | Current IT automation initiatives often focus on IT cost and productivity, rather than on comprehensive business value creation. Consequently, enterprise expectations around cost reduction tend to be highly unrealistic, leading to dissatisfaction.
Above all, IT automation strategy anchored to IT cost metrics leaves significant business value on the table. With effective prioritization, IT automation strategy, formulated as part of a broader IT modernization and business transformation strategy, has the potential to deliver breakthrough value such as superior customer experience, new revenue channels, faster time to market, and monetization of digital assets.
However, IT automation cannot be the sole driver of business outcomes. To achieve desired value, IT automation adoption needs to be supported by appropriate business process reengineering and change management initiatives. More »
Key Trends Shaping and Disrupting the Landscape of Global Services Locations | Multiple forces are driving unprecedented disruption of existing service delivery locations, including disruptive technologies, intensifying competition for talent, evolving customer preferences, pressure on growth and margins, and geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainties. In the face of these challenges, enterprises are significantly transforming their service delivery organizations – a critical part of which is their delivery locations portfolio strategies.
During this interactive session, industry peers and Everest Group experts covered top strategic trends shaping global delivery locations strategies. Attendees also heard first-hand perspectives from senior industry practitioners on key likely disruptions (e.g., automation, platforms, agile) for service delivery portfolios expected in the next 2-3 years, and how they plan to tackle these challenges to ensure survival and sharpen competitive advantage. More »
The Latest Trends in IT Services – Four Prescriptions to Make Digital Real | The IT services market is in a state of constant flux. Digital technologies, the explosion of data, and innovations in the technology startup ecosystem are changing thinking in the C-suite across industries. Based on our popular PEAK Matrix™ assessments, this webinar provides a view into the most important shifts taking place in sourcing of services and technologies. It offers the analysis and insights you need to make critical decisions about key elements of your digital services strategy, addressing issues such as how different industries are approaching digital technology adoption; what digital is and how it differs from traditional IT services; and where growth in the IT services market expected to come from and how it potentially informs your strategy. More »
Decoding the Principles of Modern Software Engineering | Enterprises are driving software-led transformation across products, services, and internal operations. Be it delivery of a seamless user experience, enhancement of operational efficiencies, or introduction of new features in their offerings, the role of software in enabling enterprise innovation and transformation is more pronounced today.
As software proliferation grows across industries, enterprises are increasingly realizing the need to shorten the software development life cycle and make it a more iterative process. They also need to create customizable and scalable offerings in line with the evolving customer expectations around personalization, connectivity, and security. Enterprises can address these objectives by integrating modern engineering principles into their software engineering efforts. In this whitepaper, we discuss these principles and the changes in software architecture, engineering practices, and technologies they necessitate. We also measure enterprise adoption and understand the challenges associated with adopting these principles. Finally, we assess how leading service providers are collaborating with enterprises and helping them create modular and scalable software in shorter development life cycles.
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Decoding Organizational DNA | Companies are waking up to an untapped source of business growth: vast amounts of new data on work and the workforce that can unlock the potential of their people. This data—now available through a range of digital innovations—is both a goldmine and a minefield.
On one hand, value as far as the eye can see: employees who are more motivated, engaged and highly productive. On the other, the potential for misuse of data: individual rights ignored, employment wrongfully terminated and employees’ skills underutilized. More »
The Wise Pivot | Disruption by digital technologies?
That’s not a new story.
What is new is “the wise pivot”, a pragmatic and replicable approach for harnessing disruption to survive, grow, and remain relevant, both today and tomorrow.
Pivot to the Future introduces business leaders to the tools they need for perpetual reinvention. It’s a battle-tested framework that helps businesses usher in new offerings and scale innovations, while simultaneously revitalizing their current businesses. More »
Future Systems | When we envisioned the Future of Applications back in 2014,1 we defined three groundbreaking strategies for applications in a world in which technology-driven disruption had become the norm.
Centered around the concepts of liquid, intelligent, and connected applications, we predicted these strategies would transform core applications and power the high-velocity, software-driven companies of today.
We now see these strategies adopted widely. With liquid applications, companies are assembling reusable components and modular architectures with a cloud-first mindset. Intelligent applications are maximizing business data through machine learning and analytics. And connected applications are providing the technological foundation for new kinds of business, partner, and customer interactions. More »
Intelligent Process Automation | Predictions for the immediate and not too distant future all point in the same direction – putting your client at the heart of all operational activities will further erode organizational silos around the front, middle, and back office, leading to the emergence of new, borderless, client-centric organizations that can optimize the way value creation is executed. More »