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.
More »
MOST POPULAR ARTICLES
1
Certified Outsourcing Professional® (COP) 2
View from the C-Suite: Rhonda Vetere, CTO, Estée Lauder Companies, Inc. 3
Show Me the Money 4
Reducing the Complexities of Scaling Ecommerce in China 5
Key Components of an Outsourcing Agreement 6
Innovation in Outsourcing: The Case of The Procter & Gamble Company 7
C–S–R You Ready? An IAOP Webinar 8
Socially Responsible Outsourcing: Doing Good While Doing Well 9
The State of Tools & Technology in The Outsourcing Industry 10
The Rise of Legal Services Outsourcing
ESOAR – the sound of successful automation | With the deluge of information around robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation thrown at us on an almost daily basis by the automation marketing machine, you might be forgiven for thinking that implementing one or a combination of these technologies at all costs is fundamental to successful transformation of your business operations. More »
Moving with the digital times | Enterprises need a new business transformation model – and it just arrived… More »
Finance automation in the financial services sector | Financial services organizations aren’t as far advanced in intelligent automation as might be expected – but the momentum is building… More »
The Future of Life Insurance & Annuities Operations | The U.S. life insurance and annuities market is facing a number of challenges, including declining margins, changing regulatory requirements, demanding consumers, inefficient operations, and intensifying competition. Life & Annuity (L&A) insurers need to rethink their traditional modes of conducting business and managing operations, in addition to overhauling the legacy technology to ensure future readiness. More »
AIOps – IT Infrastructure Services for the Digital Age | The infrastructure services landscape is undergoing a significant shift, driven by digitalization. Organizations need to reimagine the current IT infrastructure services model to deliver the necessary agility and flexibility. Automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) – which comprise the “codifying elements” for driving AIOps – enable business-aligned infrastructure that can rapidly adapt to dynamic business requirements.
Although the benefits of intelligent automation are manifold, enterprises are yet to realize commensurate advantage from investments in infrastructure services codification. Siloed adoption, lack of well-defined change management processes, and poor governance are some of the key barriers to achieving the expected value. Enterprises need to have business-aligned adoption strategy, underpinned by an effective value measurement framework.
More »
Transform with RPA: Reject the Myths, Embrace the Potential | Are you positioning your company for real success in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)? Increasingly, companies are doing just that. They are moving out of the RPA “pilot” stage and beginning to reap real, lasting value from their RPA initiatives. More »
Sole-Source Outsourcing - Ensuring a Successful Outcome | As companies look for ways to streamline the outsourcing process, a range of reasons may make sole sourcing a viable, cost- and time-saving option – if applied wisely.
Sole sourcing is the practice of working with a single service provider to define, negotiate, and purchase services. Traditionally, buyers employed sole sourcing to deliver a simplified, faster service acquisition process, with fewer of the difficulties of staging and reviewing a multi-provider process. Today, the use of sole sourcing is most often a function of the trust that exists between a buyer and service provider. As buyers of outsourcing services look to limit the proliferation of service providers with whom they maintain relationships, the sole-source option is becoming increasingly relevant.
Sole sourcing can deliver significant potential efficiencies over multi-provider outsourcing efforts in terms of cost for completing the process and time required to make a decision. However, a sole-source approach is susceptible to stakeholder challenges that should be addressed early on to ensure a successful outcome. Doing so increases the chance that the initiative will suit the buyer’s and service provider’s objectives – today and in the future. More »
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Chatbots - White Paper | Over 33,000 messenger chatbots have been developed since April 2016, with over half of web users relying on instant messaging every day. Messaging and chatbots are inarguable solutions for creating a simplified customer journey and experience. This whitepaper provides the various tools for understanding and developing chatbots in order to effectively engage in this new conversational experience. More »
Preparing Seasonal and Regular Agents with Blending Learning | In 2017, Learning Tribes, a venture of Sitel Group, introduced a blended onboarding and training solution for an international retail client that was struggling to prepare seasonal and regular agents during peak season. By delivering a customized blending learning program, the retailer was able to cut training time, improve agent satisfaction, and deliver over $1.1 million in annual savings. More »
Beyond Bitcoin: Blockchains for Business | Perhaps no other technology will change the rules of business more than Blockchain. Technically, a blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed record that validates and permanently stores transactions based on encryption and community consensus. Blockchain is to transactions as the Internet is to information: it has the potential to decentralize, democratize, and disintermediate transactions. More »
Reimagining Enterprise IT Services Sourcing | As enterprises ramp up their digital transformation initiatives, the IT Strategic Sourcing and Vendor Management (SS&VM) function faces the onerous task of establishing and orchestrating an IT services vendor portfolio that can help the enterprise navigate the proverbial IT maze and fulfill strategic business objectives. However, this is clearly easier said than done. Current enterprise satisfaction with incumbent IT service providers stands at an all-time low – 54% of all reference enterprise discussions Everest Group conducted in 2017 expressed dissatisfaction with their IT service providers. More »
Retail Industry Whitepaper | The retail industry is ready for a revolution. Brands can no longer simple be "present" across communications and sales channels. It's no longer about brick-and-mortar retail stores or digital e-commerce websites, but about a blend of both in this "Phygital" retail era. In this White Paper, our experts will highlight the new trends in the market and point to the critical solutions for harnessing the transformation and enabling every one of you to become heavyweight contenders in your own sectors.
More »
Top 5 RPA Myths Dispelled | Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is all the rage these days; however, while adoption continues to accelerate, myths persist. In this fact-based webinar deck, Everest Group dispels the five most common myths based on in-depth research into the practices of the Pinnacle (or best performing) Enterprises™. The deck uncovers the truth behind these myths and reveals how the best performing organizations are realizing a 50% improvement in operational metrics through RPA implementation, and 30% cost savings on RPA investments. More »
The Future of Procurement in the Digital Age | To become a strategic contributor that enables business outcomes, procurement has to move beyond cost savings and compliance, and many have already done some thinking; a definite vision is coalescing for what the procurement of tomorrow will look like. However, how do we get from where we are today to what will be required tomorrow? How do we move our procurement organization along the capability continuum in order to achieve the forward-looking vision of the function? In other words, how are we to realize the procurement of the future? More »
Creating Business Value Through a Next-Generation Smart Digital Workforce | Digital transformation has a survival necessity in this era of disruptive business models and rapidly-changing markets. Until recently, most automation projects have been done in silos, confined to task-level automation, and mostly targeted at achieving short-term tactical benefits. However, enterprises are now exploring benefits beyond the task level, developing digital capabilities for to achieve targeted business outcomes. One key to success is a smart digital workforce with enterprise-grade SDA technologies and solutions that can help the organization achieve strategic business outcomes. More »