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
Neo Group Client Case Study - Healthcare and Insurance Services | A diversified enterprise with interests in healthcare technology and insurance services - faced a challenge and an opportunity. They needed to accelerate product development and leverage vendor capabilities to benefit from industry trends such as automation and other innovative developments, while also reducing operating costs and moving employees to higher value work.
One of the main issues was to harmonize the method and use of IT service providers across different companies within the group. One company had undertaken a formal outsourcing program using two different partners. The other company used several different resource and staffing agencies to access expertise as needed.
Both companies had a different approach to outsourcing, and neither were optimally managing their IT workforce. More »
Contracting for Agile and DevOps | It has been nearly 20 years since the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was released; since that time, four key values and 12 principles that form its bedrock have been instrumental in revolutionizing product delivery across industries and organizations. However, even after almost two decades, many enterprises struggle to scale up Agile adoption - in fact, it is only the last two to three years that we have begun to see contracts customized to an Agile delivery model. More »
The Concept of Ideal Talent – A Game-Changer in Talent Management | Talent is a top strategic priority for organizations around the world. However, while talent is a great enabler – even a competitive differentiator – it also presents significant challenges, as virtually all CXO surveys demonstrate. Beyond senior leaders, virtually every business leader and hiring manager wants to attract, hire, engage, and retain the best talent, and studies show that employees also want to be, and work with, effective team members.
A common underlying thread of talent discussions is the concept of an “ideal” or “perfect” employee.
The rise of digital technologies significantly advances our capability to move the ideal talent discussion from gut feel to science. We have the necessary capabilities to apply a more formalized, structured, and analytical approach, intelligently combining multiple digital elements to practically implement the ideal talent concept with far-reaching impact across the talent management spectrum and benefits across the organization.
In this paper, we dig into this concept of ideal talent: what it means, its benefits, and how to implement this ideal by building ideal talent profiles, as well as some best practices. More »
2020 Enterprise Key Issues in Global Sourcing: Setting Course When Uncertainty Rules Supreme | Despite positive conditions such as a historically high stock market, low unemployment, and high interest rates ? market uncertainty continues to impact industry optimism. Yet, the opportunity to win remains, and the stakes to capitalize on the right investments are higher than ever.
In this session, Everest Group’s Michel Janssen and Eric Simonson present common sentiments as identified by you and your peers as part of our recent study on enterprise key issues as well as provide breakdowns around five market convictions. In addition, this deck covers: leading implications for enterprises engaged with service providers and key value propositions to consider for both insourcing and outsourcing; and, potential enterprise adjustments around service provider portfolio consolidations, deal size, and value realization. More »
Moving Financial Services Organizations to the Cloud | For financial institutions, the decision to migrate to the cloud is often met with hesitation due to security, compliance, performance or optimization concerns. The financial industry continues to utilize legacy IT infrastructure and brick-and-mortar delivery modules to support financial interactions to customers. After years of the status quo, financial technology companies are bringing to market innovative and user-friendly digital platforms that allow consumers to interact with their finances wherever they are, quickly, securely and easily. This has come at a time where more and more consumers are more willing to try a non-financial brand for their financial needs. More »
GOV19 Presentations | More »
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 »