In this episode of the Sourcing Industry Landscape, Dawn Tiura interviews Michael Kearns. Mike Kearns is the Vice President of Enterprise Strategy at Toptal, an on-demand freelance talent procurement network.
Outsourcing decisions often come down to a relatively simple cost-driven Return on Investment (ROI) calculation: how much will the cost change in each scenario and how quickly can that investment be recovered?
On the surface, this purely economic approach seems appropriate enough. After all, economics are certainly important. But over-reliance on purely financial-driven outsourcing decisions is one of the biggest causes of the “strategy-to-execution gap,” namely the distance between a company’s business strategies and its ability to execute on them.
This month’s Academic of Outsourcing tribute goes to Douglass C. North for his work on “new institutional economics.” North – a professor, economist, philosopher and economic historian – was the co-recipient (with Robert Fogel) of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.”
When a business is choosing which company to outsource with, location can often be overlooked in favour of the most appropriate specialist for the project. However, location – and especially proximity - should be a critical part of the decision process. For example, if your company is based in Europe, it will be more difficult to outsource from a provider based in Asia, due to a mixture of time, travel, language, and perhaps cultural differences.
By now everyone knows about outsourcing, the big issue of the 20th century that revolutionized the 21st century. But outsourcing didn’t start in the 20th century. In the 18th and 19th century Europe developed Imperialism, setting up colonies around the world. These colonies provided the language skills and education systems that made offshoring possible.
This month’s column features big thinker Ronald Dworkin. I like Dworkin because he tackles and integrates major ideas in ethics, morality, equality, justice and the “unity of value.” One of his most famous of many books is entitled Justice for Hedgehogs.
Don’t let the humorous book title fool you; there’s no question that Dworkin is a heavyweight. Dworkin is a Professor of Philosophy and the Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London.
A common question when considering Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is what process would be the most optimal one to automate. When looking for a candidate process, you should be focused on a couple key requirements. First, you will want to identify a process that is rule-based, so it doesn't require any human judgment capabilities in its operation. If you have processes that have human-judgement elements, they may still be suitable for RPA but you'll need to hand out that portion of the work to be done by an individual and then pass back it back to the robot.
Customers embark on an RPA journey for a variety of reasons. For some it's about not being able to grow organically with the traditional models of adding new people into the mix. For others, it can be a desire to achieve greater cost certainty and overcome the challenges of moving work offshore and the uncertainty that it brings into today's political climate. Regardless of the reasons why companies embark on the journey, a common outcome is sought - a high-quality service with a reduced cost of operating.
Almost every week in the last few months someone has asked me about the general mood on the streets of Bangalore. What are the IT professionals in the Silicon Valley of East making of the changes in the industry? How is the senior management of offshore headquartered service providers preparing for the future? While there are several versions of the predicted future, everyone agrees that this is a watershed moment in the evolution of the IT outsourcing and offshoring industry.
How the rise of smart cities and smart manufacturing is driving the future of nearshoring
A 2012 report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimated that nearly 21 million people worldwide are victims of forced labour, with the highest concentrations found in countries in central and southeastern Europe and in Africa. With complex global supply chains the main vehicle of global trade and commerce, regulators face a stiff challenge policing against workplace abuse, especially given the pattern of outsourcing production to jurisdictions where labour standards and their enforcement are weaker than at home.
Over the past two decades, networking has been severely limited: it simply could not keep up with new demands from businesses in an increasingly digital world. However, that is all about to change thanks to the creation of software-defined networking, or SDN. Part of an ongoing wave of “virtualisation” in the IT industry, SDN allows people (particularly businesses with large IT systems) to control network behaviour through a handy piece of software, instead of having to go into the network infrastructure and alter things manually.
I was thinking of what I could say about the outsourcing market at the end of 2016. My initial thoughts were about how I feel that the term itself is dying out. Companies are much more likely to be exploring partnerships today.
The Register likes to put the boot in when they comment on IT stories, so it was no surprise to see a recent feature about Fujitsu in which The Register summarised that Fujitsu needs to "get a move on" if they are going to transform their business to meet the expectations of customers today.
Not too long back, many global IT service providers were known to move delivery of IT services of their clients to offshore locations (like South Africa, Latin America or India) without informing their clients. This was seen as an internal lever to make customer contracts more profitable in a multi-year deal as services were first stabilised in a high-cost onshore delivery location before being shipped to an offshore location.
