A Week Is A Long Time In Editorial

Phew, what a week: debates aplenty and a plethora of first-class presentations to absorb – and this despite being unable to attend the IACCM’s EMEA 2008 event (sorry Tim!).

I’ve just returned from hosting a roundtable at SSON’s Planning & Implementing Successful New Shared Services event at London’s Cafe Royal. A wide-ranging discussion – to be transcribed and published forthwith – included some great lessons on getting automation right first time; the key topic, however, became the value of a solid and comprehensive change program at the business-case stage (something David Lines looked back on in our “If I could do it all again…” series last week). Opinion was pretty much unanimous that some of the biggest obstacles to a successful implementation can be avoided – or at least reduced in scale – by getting the programme right at the very beginning, and sticking to it. For much more detail on this topic and a host of others, keep an eye on the SSON homepage for the link to the transcription: coming soon to a PC near you…

Another roundtable – with plenty of forthright comment and lashings of controversy – took place on Tuesday when an august body of participants from across the sourcing space (and your not-so-august editor) looked at “Offshore Outsourcing: Can We Have Our Cake And Eat It?” – I’ll be publishing this tomorrow and can guarantee it’ll inform and provoke, with some excellent points raised by – among others – Stan LePeak from EquaTerra, Duncan Aitchison from TPI and controversialist-in-chief Vivek Wadhwa. Do let me know your thoughts on this topic – and let me have your ideas for future debates. We’re here to serve, after all.

Also on Tuesday I was lucky enough to get an exclusive interview with the President of India’s NASSCOM, Som Mittal. (I say “lucky” – three months of badgering his PR team probably helped my fortunes a little) NASSCOM is an increasingly influential body both within and beyond India and it was interesting to see how the organization is working to improve the country’s educational and training infrastructure, as well as to get Mittal’s views on how the sourcing space has changed in recent years – and what he sees as being the challenges facing the sector in times to come. Again, this interview will be hitting the SSON pages very shortly – possible after my own bit of outsourcing in the transcription space…

Meanwhile I’m waiting to hear back from my colleagues in the US as to what were the big topics at SSON’s Shared Services Summit in Vegas: one thing big takeaway – in the sense that it was the house doing the taking away – is that blackjack proved a sub-optimal investment strategy for at least one (un)lucky punter. Several billion dollars more optimal than Lehman Bros’, however. I guess it helps to have a sense of perspective, although the late and much-lamented Douglas Adams would disagree.

Before I leave (relatively speaking, I hope…) I must advise you to check out my interview with consultant, thinker and doer extraordinaire Bryan Bergeron. The man’s CV is phenomenal and if it weren’t for the fact that he gets up at 2am every day I’d be seethingly envious. Contender for Polymath of the Year, for sure. (NB: this is a fictitious award so please don’t start sending in your votes, unless they’re accompanied by vast sums of money…)

Until next time,

Jamie

At The End Of The Storm, There’s A Golden Sky…

A pretty traumatic week for many looks, at the time of writing (fingers well and truly crossed – wichh ins’t hpelnig my tpiyng) to be ending on an up-note for the financial sector with significant market recovery in New York, London and a few other markets. However, you know all that (unless, of course, you turn to this blog before checking the news, in which case congratulations on your perspicacity); what you’re looking for here is juicy shared services and outsourcing comment, views, debate…

Well, there’ll be plenty of that next week when – assuming the markets don’t join forces with CERN and suck us all into some kind of world-consuming system-smashing black hole – I’m going to the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management’s EMEA 2008 conference on “Making Sense Of Opportunity and Risk: The Journey To Contracting Excellence”, hosting my promised roundtable on “Offshore Outsourcing: Can We Have Our Cake And Eat It?”, and attending SSON’s own Planning & Implementing Successful New Shared Services event in London (my colleagues, meanwhile, will be enjoying our 12th Annual Shared Services Summit in Las Vegas but hey, I’m not bitter: them’s the breaks) at which I’ll be running another roundtable on getting the basics right at the very beginning of a shared services journey. All of which events, dear friends, you’ll be able to read about right here when I get my blogging hat back on next week.

So meanwhile, in the interests of providing some light at the end of (ok: in the middle of – but at least it’s not a fire) the tunnel, at the end of one of the most tumultuous weeks the global economy has faced, I’m going to put all that serious stuff to one side and instead offer you the sheer beautiful glory of this.

Because sometime, sooner or later, whatever happens, the rain will stop and the sun will shine.

Have a good weekend.

Interesting Times

“May you live in interesting times” is, allegedly, an old Chinese curse. Well, for the financial sector – and consequently the rest of the world – these are interesting times indeed; “interesting” probably isn’t the word most commonly used in banking circles to describe the current situation but there’s certainly plenty of cursing. I’ve been fortunate enough to share my morning commute over the past two days with an erstwhile employee of Lehman in London and suffice it to say that however interesting times are now they’re going to be a lot more so when next month’s mortgage payments, credit card bills etc start mounting up. Likewise for the rest of us: the real impact of what’s happening right now won’t be felt for a while yet, and in the meantime who knows what other world-shaking events might lie round the corner? One thing’s for sure: the aftershocks will be felt for years ahead.

Some of those aftershocks, of course, will surge through the shared services space and the outsourcing sector – but in markedly different ways. It’s far too early to start any holistic assessment but there’s nothing wrong with some good old-fashioned wild speculation (other than that wild speculation was of course what got us into this mess in the first place). In outsourcing for instance it’s pretty likely that while there may be short-term difficulties (and today it was noticeable that several leading outsourcing stocks were taking pretty big nosedives, albeit temporary) in the long run the credit crunch could lead to serious growth opportunities as panicky businesses take the outsourcing route to cost-cutting.

See how WNS’ Neeraj Bhargava in an exclusive interview with SSON looked at the pros and cons of the current situation:

“I think the credit crunch and what is possibly recession, high inflation, does create a difficult environment for our clients or our prospective clients. They’re seeing a lot of dramatic changes in their business. That creates two issues simultaneously: first, the need to cut costs and focus on core business; and second, they perceive that need to be more acute. That is, in fact, very positive for our business. The flip-side to that is that there is also a lot more pressure on dealing with day-to-day issues, there will be more M&A activity, people have less money to spend on change: these are distractions that sometimes constrain them from taking outsourcing decisions. So it’s a bit of a mixed bag.”

As for shared services: well, there’s plenty to talk about there. So much so that I’m convening another roundtable debate for the beginning of October on just this topic. You can read the transcript of “Shared Services in the Face of a Financial Crisis” on this very site once, er, it’s been transcribed. Meanwhile you can send in any thoughts you might have on the issue to me here; I’ll try to cover as many of your thoughts as possible on the roundtable agenda.

Until next time,

Jamie

To Begin At The Beginning…

OK: it’s been a while, but at long last the SSON editorial blog starts here. I’m aiming to deliver comment and controversy in equal (hopefully coherent) measure, but considering my current companions on this site are two of the industry’s most respected bloggers in Phil Fersht and Peter Allen, my primary ambition is just to keep my head above water (not drowning but waving, etc etc).

It’s been a fascinating few days for me, kicking off with Vivek Wadhwa’s merciless attack on high-end offshore outsourcing (you can listen to the podcast here) and moving directly to the other end of the spectrum with chats with a couple of the most senior figures in the Indian outsourcing industry (in the very near future we’re launching a series of interviews with the head honchos of the biggest outsourcing players on the market: watch this space). Not that I needed reminding, but I was reminded anyway of just how contentious an issue outsourcing can be – and how deeply entwined in modern commerce it is. Regardless of your opinion, it’s not going away, folks… For those of you interested in looming issues (that’s not a textiles reference, btw) I’m running a roundtable on “Offshore Outsourcing: Can We Have Our Cake And Eat It?” towards the end of this month; a full transcript will be published on the site.

Meanwhile: I’ve just returned from SSON’s 8th Annual HR Transformation: Outsourcing & Shared Services 2008 conference in London (we’ll be putting all sorts of juicy content from this event online over the next few weeks so keep your eyes peeled). While there were plenty of takeaways, one thing that’s really stuck in my mind is the sheer volume of disapproval directed at one of the very biggest names in ERP (it’s certainly bigger than three letters…). I didn’t really hear a single positive word said about this particular, very expensive piece of kit – and I was listening hard. Not the best advertisement for [proprietary name deleted by nervous (read "cowardly") legal team].

One last word: I’d like to welcome Phil Fersht and his indispensable Horses for Sources blog to SSON. Phil’s been informing and entertaining the sourcing world for a long time now and we’re ecstatic to have him onboard.

Have a great weekend,

Jamie