One vision, 360 degrees
Last week I had the great and highly enjoyable privilege of hosting a webinar given by Jeff Seabloom, Alsbridge’s Chief Revenue Officer, entitled ‘A 360-Degree View of IT: Six Key Questions’.
Last week I had the great and highly enjoyable privilege of hosting a webinar given by Jeff Seabloom, Alsbridge’s Chief Revenue Officer, entitled ‘A 360-Degree View of IT: Six Key Questions’.
Over the last month, British businesses have been bombarded with other people’s opinions. In the outsourcing industry, this is quite normal: everyone and their dog has a strong opinion on how outsourcing companies should and shouldn’t operate. But this time, we’re being told that our businesses are on the line because of a vote.
The Commercial Court ruling in BT Cornwall Limited v Cornwall Council and Others is a sharp reminder that if an outsourced service provider does not provide the service it has promised to provide, to the standard it has promised, it should not expect the customer to allow the contract, however large and multi-faceted, to continue. Put another way, the customer is almost always right.
The basis upon which European businesses are able to send personal data outside of Europe – and, especially, to the United States – has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny and negotiation between the EU Justice Commissioner and the US Department of Commerce. The outcome seems to be that EU businesses are allowed to send data to the US, but it’s useful to understand the background and what has been agreed.
Two very different things set the backdrop to last week’s EU/US agreement.
Across all sectors of the UK economy, consumer-facing businesses are finding themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, consumer expectations are inexorably rising; driven ever higher by rapidly evolving technologies and an ‘at your fingertips’ service culture. At the same time, however, the hangover of the recession together with competitive markets means businesses continue to squeeze more out of fixed (or more likely, reduced) budgets. The transport sector is no different.
Pulling into the snowy parking lot and contemplating today’s meeting, my mind wandered to a line from Michael Margolis, the CEO of Get Storied, “If you want to understand the culture, listen to the stories; if you want to change the culture, change the stories.” Carl, the site manager of Excel, the inside-outsourcing service provider at this motorcycle plant, had called a few weeks back and enticed me to visit by stating, “I have a great story for you.”
There is a significant shift in customer experience management in Europe as more brands shun traditional offshoring destinations in favour of customer contact centres closer to their customers. In an increasingly competitive global market, organisations are seeking to boost revenue and profits by strengthening customer relationships and using customer service to gain competitive advantage.
As outsourcing has matured as a practice, and as new technologies such as cloud have come to the fore, the nature, composition and scope of deals have evolved dramatically: we live in an age of multisourcing, of hybrid delivery environments and of the ongoing transition to global business services.
The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has discovered that a third of organisations find moving to cloud services a very difficult process. The study of 250 UK private and public sector senior IT and business decision-makers discovered that the step change to the cloud had been much more complicated than originally anticipated. The shift to could often involves changes in business process in order to succeed and hit the optimum levels of efficiency gains.