Pullastrine Punditry

President Obama’s speech to Congress this week has certainly put the proverbial cat among the outsourcing pigeons (note to self: “Outsourcing Pigeons” is a great name for a rock band, as well as a potentially interesting Sunday afternoon pastime): his promise that his administration his administration “will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas” has led to vast acreage of comment in the business pages and the blogosphere alike.

Of course it’s hardly awash with specifics, that question – what about all the corporations who’ve already offshored jobs, for instance? – but, rather like similar comments Obama made on the campaign, his words have led to a frenzy of debate, particularly in India where several already-antsy BPO pundits have all but proclaimed the death of the country’s outsourcing industry (and where the not-exactly-spin-shy NASSCOM, on the other hand, put out a press release praising Obama’s speech for including an attack on protectionist policies). Once again, as with the campaign comments, it’s too early to see the true significance of this latest pledge – but that’s no obstacle to a good burst of hypothesis, conjecture and all-round speculation and I applaud it wholeheartedly: let me have your own thoughts.

The crisis which prompted Obama’s pre-budgetary oration continues, of course, to rage more or less unabated; to commemorate six months since the beginning of what might (will, in fact, at least here) be called the main phase of the crisis which commenced with the takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the collapse of Lehman Bros, the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network will be running a content series deviously entitled “The Crisis: Six Months In”. Along with some other goodies we’re going to publish a collection of your own thoughts on events (rather like our Year in Review and Year Ahead features at the tail-end of last year), and I’m looking for a few lines from you on each of the following three questions:

• What have been the biggest consequences for the shared services and outsourcing space of the economic crisis over the last six months?
• Specifically (and in as much detail as you can give!) how has the crisis impacted upon your own organisation?
• Six months in, what’s your perspective on how you see the space developing over the next six months?

We’ll be publishing this feature in the middle of March so your deadline, ladies and gents, is March 9 – I look forward to receiving a cornucopia of wondrous opinings at jamie.liddell@ssonetwork.com

(On the subject of great content: don’t forget to check out the Latin American shared services roundtable, the transcript of which I – at long last – put up on the site today. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.)

I’m off for an interview: in my absence, take a look at this. “Fun”, eh?

Jamie

The Journey to World-Class Begins with a Single Step

At the end of last week, and in the wake of yet another very well-received presentation of his at the 3rd Annual Shared Services & Outsourcing Summit 2009 in London, I interviewed Tom Bangemann of The Hackett Group, a long-standing SSON stalwart and an all-round good fellow. Tom had presented on “The Implications of Globalization & the Economic Crisis for Mature Shared Services” – topics which he also investigates briefly in our interview, which I’ll be putting up on the site this week, along with the pdf of his presentation.

One of the crucial things to come out of Tom’s presentation is that while “world-class” as defined by the Hackett methodology is clearly a reasonable state to which to aspire, there’s no one single path to the Holy Grail (fortunately, since anyone familiar with either Indiana Jones or Monty Python would otherwise probably seriously consider the merits of mediocrity); for example, Tom told the conference that while the majority of world-class organizations have a single-instance ERP strategy, one world-class company has an incredible 83 ERP systems (frankly, that’s just greedy, in my opinion).

A logical corollary of this diversity of approaches, surely, is that there’s no single answer to the more-than-pressing questions being thrown at companies worldwide by the current economic turmoil. Flexibility and agility are more important now than ever and with so many of the old uncertainties out of the window new ways of working are emerging which will, in the long term, change business fundamentally and forever. One thing’s for sure: what’s world-class in a few years’ time will look very different from how it does now.

(This is an ideal time for a – to quote the esteemed Dr Hannibal Lecter – “ham-handed segue” into another plug for The Hackett Group and SSON Service Center Benchmark Study – if you haven’t signed up already, why not?)

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the ever-expanding universe that is SSON: the 6th Procure-to-Pay Summit is underway in Miami, and to commemorate this event (ok, not really – it’s plain old serendipity again) we’ve launched our long-awaited P2P Special Focus series, with an interview with Julienne Sugarek of CenterPoint Energy which you can listen to or read depending on inclination and taste. The Summit itself enjoyed a successful workshop day yesterday and the main conference opens today with keynote presentations from Julienne, and from Amgen’s Ramesh Krish – who’ll also be appearing on SSON next week with a look at applying Six Sigma methodology to P2P processes.

I was going to sign off by linking to something related to The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which I read over the weekend and which is a truly phenomenal novel (albeit with very little relevance to shared services and/or outsourcing) which I can’t recommend highly enough. However I couldn’t find anything appropriate so instead I thought I’d give in to the incessant demand for more goat-related content: check out these little fellers. I challenge you not to laugh out loud.

Jamie

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Allegedly)

The devil’s banquet of our present economic travails has been spiced and seasoned by the unmasking of a few ALLEGEDLY unsavoury individuals; the apparent exploits of Sir Allen Stanford might not quite equal those of Bernie Madoff in scale but $8 billion’s not to be sniffed at, and according to my diligent research (ie, Wikipedia) “the FBI and other agencies have been conducting an ongoing investigation of Stanford since 2008 for possible involvement in money laundering for Mexico’s Gulf Cartel” – and THEY’RE a lovely bunch, of course. Salt-of-the-earth types. Keep their heads while all around them are losing theirs etc etc.

Anyway: surrounded by such a miasma of ALLEGEDLY nefarious activity, it’s good to know some people are still striding the straight and narrow – and working to ensure the rest of us do too. I’m thinking in particular of the good ladies and gents of the Pilipinas Anti-Piracy Team (PAPT), an agency of the Filipino government made up of representatives of the national police, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), and the Optical Media Board (OMB).

As the Filipino outsourcing industry grows at a precocious rate (helped by some opportunistic marketing – the country has made solid capital out of the hits taken by Indian outsourcing following the Satyam affair) the risks posed by piracy and other software theft have grown accordingly – recent reports suggest that piracy now costs Filipino tech companies over $155 million annually with an increasing portion of that afflicting ITO and BPO providers. The PAPT – driven no doubt by the need to safeguard the vital revenue generated by outsourcing to the country as well as by sheer high-minded virtue – has launched a campaign entitled “Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late!” aimed at firms using unlicensed software; a number of firms – foreign- as well as domestic-owned – have already been raided by the team, and “the [national police] will be enforcing the law to the fullest extent as it is duty-bound to do,” according to police chief Jesus Verzosa.

Why does this matter? Because at times like these – and with the ripples of the Satyam scandal still, unfortunately, making waves in the minds of firms considering offshore outsourcing – it’s vital for companies to have faith that their outsourcing providers are completely above board. The kind of partnership created by an outsourcing deal requires a great deal of that most precious of commodities, trust: trust not just that your partner will behave as it should with your data and your mission-critical processes, but that it will still be around, rather than closed down for infringements of software legislation, for the duration of the partnership. Hats off to PAPT for its efforts to ensure that trust remains a viable proposition.

On a completely different subject far, far away from all that has gone before: I was very interested to see the discussion regarding the Black Book of Outsourcing has been reopened following my fellow blogger Phil Fersht’s recent post on “The Black Book of Hollywood”. Will the debate reach the heights (and depths) of last year’s exchanges? I’ll be following it closely and would welcome any of your thoughts on the matter.

I’ll leave you with a golden oldie: I spent yesterday evening rediscovering Tom Lehrer and thought that even those of you familiar with it would appreciate listening to this once again. Awesome.

Jamie

Heavy Water

Reading a CNN report on the current tribulations of the Japanese economy (currently in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the Second World War, with GDP falling at an annual rate of 12.7% – yeah, I did a double-take too – in Q408 ) I found myself musing once again on the consolatory qualities of all being in the same pickle-jar/handcart/frying-pan/paddleless-vessel-up-an-unsavoury-creek (select your own metaphor). It’s an interesting quirk of human nature that somehow things always seem that little bit less bleak if you’re in company; being hit by Hurricane Credit Crunch is pretty miserable but there is nonetheless some small comfort in knowing that we’re most of us in the same capsized boat.

A variant on that, of course – and one which is both less wretched and more useful in the long term – is the boost to one’s mental wellbeing that comes from knowing that even if nobody else is in the same situation as you are right there and then, people have walked/swum/plunged that way before. The consolation that comes from being only the latest down that particular path might be comparatively minimal (particularly if it’s the path to the scaffold) but the opportunity to learn from others’ experiences in an attempt to get off the path altogether could be invaluable – hence the popularity of our “If I could do it all again…” series, among much else.

One of the problems with the current crisis, of course, is that there really hasn’t been anything quite like it before – so while we can scrabble about (to return to the nautical metaphor) in the ocean of memory looking for a few Great Depression-era planks onto which to grab, we’re not really sure how buoyant they are anyway. But there’s another advantage of being in the same boat together, clearly: if we work together, we can pool resources and ideas in an attempt to keep the boat on the surface long enough to reach dry land. So let’s embrace the idea of a concerted effort, and leave consolation to the philosophers. And then if the effort fails anyway at least a) we’ll have tried and b) we’ll all be able to spell “SOS” in plenty of different languages as we all go down together.

(If all of that seems a little too serious for a Monday morning, try this instead.)

Jamie

PS: Meant to put this out last week but the curse of Friday 13th struck my computer: for those of you who don’t know (and why not?) SSON has teamed up with The Hackett Group to offer a special service center benchmark study which aims to assist executives objectively assess how well their service center or centers are performing in relation to peer company service delivery model centers and between service delivery models. You can find out more information on the benefits of participation, and how to sign up, here.

PPS: The curse of Friday 13th also meant I couldn’t plug last Friday’s Weekly Wrap, a problem which I can, to general delight, resolve here.

As I Was Saying…

Working on the principle “better late than never” (which isn’t a law one would want to observe related to, say, catastrophic asteroid strikes, but is fit for my purpose today) allow me to bring you some of my learnings from the second day – Tuesday – of London’s Shared Services & Outsourcing Summit 2009.

A faacinating morning’s session began with Andrew Kent of Serco looking at “Fast-Tracking Maturity: Serco’s Transition to a Global, Outsourced and Standardised Multi-Functional SSO”. I’m not going into detail on this one as Andrew has kindly agreed to work with me on an article about Serco’s transition, and the company’s partnership with provider Genpact – and of course I’ll bring you more information on that down the line – so those who didn’t attend will have to trust me when I say Serco’s is an ambitious and extremely impressive project and the partnership has a number of model aspects we’ll be looking to highlight going forwards.

Following Andrew’s presentation was a panel debate featuring speakers from across the shared services and outsourcing space, and covering – with the help of an active audience – some of the key issues affecting the space today – particularly in the UK and continental Europe. Again, SSON will be bringing you content from this debate (I believe my colleague Barbara Hodge is working on something special for Shared Services News as I write these very words) but to give you a taste of what to expect, topics investigated included: single versus multiple ERP systems; the impact of social networking on enterprise-wide HR systems; the weakness of the pound and consequences for business cases; the prospect for outsourcing in the face of consolidation among big businesses; the future for supply chain management; and the growth or otherwise of “back-shoring”. And if that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what will.

In the afternoon I enjoyed, among others, the presentation by Jairo Rojas of BASDA on the impact on business of a future low-carbon economy. This provocative and at time revelatory talk highlighted some of the huge challenges lying around the corner for businesses worldwide and confirmed, if confirmation were required, the need for firms to prepare now for those challenges. Those who are asleep at the wheel, Rojas implied, only have themselves to blame if they plummet over the precipice – and there’s certainly no excuse whatsoever for not waking up (to push the metaphor a little further) if you’re reading this, since I grabbed Rojas for an interview following his presentation; you can listen to the podcast here.

There’ll be plenty more content and discussion emerging from the Summit over the next couple of weeks so keep your eye on the homepage and the Gateway e-newsletter; meanwhile I’m moving going back out to the P2P front line for the purchase-to-pay editorial project I’ve been oh-so-subtly pushing through this blog over the last couple of weeks…

Jamie

PS: This made me laugh… and laugh… and occasionally wince…

The Summit of Being

A beguiling opening day at the Shared Services & Outsourcing Summit 2009 in London; my plan to blog live from the Summit was stymied somewhat by technical issues but, devoted as ever, I’ve hightailed it back to the office to bring you some of the highlights from Day One (and to finish off the cookies and Haribo – it’s all about the perks).

First up for me was Mark Reason, Commercial Director Shared Systems of BAe Systems, looking at “Effectively Renegotiating with New and Incumbent BPOs to Meet Changing Business Needs”. Reason gave us three case studies examining, respectively, BAe’s ITO, HRO and RPO programmes over the last few years; the firm took a different approach throughout each of these endeavours (in one of them actually taking two bidders right up to contract-signing stage before making a final selection – how’s that for hardball?) with differing results. Overall – and I’ll be bringing you much more in-depth content from this session further down the line, so forgive the succinctness here – it came down to Reason’s summation: “Ultimately you have to be an intelligent customer.”

Thence to Herald Jongen of Allen & Overy on “Practical Approaches for Dispute Resolution” – which I hope to cover thoroughly next week – before settling into a great afternoon debate on “What Does the Future Hold for Captive Shared Services?” hosted by Ian McAtamney, Shared Services Programme Manager, Travelport. This covered a great deal of ground, and I’m going to be publishing a transcript on the site for your delectation and enlightenment as soon as I can; suffice it to say that while the captive is most definitely far from dead, the majority of those questioned will be increasing the outsourced portion of their workload over the next 12 months while a couple of organisations – naming no names, of course – will be aiming to divest all or most of their existing SSOs (see how this compares with teh findings of our roundtable debate on Sourcing in the Face of a Financial Crisis). Oddly (or not), these measures seemed in general to have been agreed a while before the beginning of the current financial End of Days we’re in; perhaps many people were keeping more recent developments under wraps, but the credit crunch and the other three horsemen appear to be having an acceleratory, rather than transformative, effect on outsourcing plans among those participating. See what you think when I publish the transcript.

I’m off – the cookies have run out. I’ll be back tomorrow with more from the Summit. If you can’t wait that long to hear from me (of course) you can check out last Friday’s Weekly Wrap in the meantime.

Or you can just sit back and listen to this. Outstanding.

Jamie

Lessons Learnt, Lessons Shared

I have learnt many things over the past few days (one of the delights of working in such a broad field – not something you’d hear a manual turnip-harvester say that often, but then that’s always been a very disenfranchised constituency). One of the least surprising, in hindsight, but the one with the biggest impact on my daily existence, has been the discovery that for something with such a short name, P2P is actually a very big topic indeed.

As I may have mentioned, the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network will shortly be launching a weekly content series on P2P, and I’m currently speaking to all sorts of people from all across the function about a mind-boggling (admittedly my mind is easily boggled) number of different aspects of the topic. As much as I can manage of this new-found learning, of course, will find its way onto the screens of www.ssonetwork.com and beyond, but I’ve learned this week that this is, of course, only a small fraction of the function and, as often happens in this role, I’m increasingly admiring of those hardy souls who manage to attain an end-to-end mastery of their domain. People, I raise my hat to you. (For the rest of us mortals there’s the 6th Procure-to-Pay Summit to help us along the P2P path. There’s also – as of this week - the new PRACTITIONER-ONLY P2P Global Council group hosted on LinkedIn.)

Another thing I have learnt recently, as part of my work on an article about change management at Royal Mail, is that a lighter-hearted-than-normal approach to what can occasionally be extremely dry subjects can pay great dividends; as evidence I would like to introduce Edward Sourcing, a character in this fine work by the Royal Mail Technology Procurement team…

But by far the most important thing I’ve come to understand since I last blogged is that when accompanying one’s offspring to the dentist, one must ALWAYS bring a video camera. Why? Take a look.

Jamie

Snow Joke

Amazing what a difference a bit of snow makes to the London landscape – the difference being that between a functional “world city” and the kind of whitened wasteland last seen by Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys. As much of the rest of the world looked on in a kind of astounded mockery, the furnaces of the Big Smoke were all snuffed out yesterday by a few inches of the white stuff – meaning a slight delay to the UK operations of SSON and, er, to this blog. Much, however, as this blogger in particular would have loved to have regressed along with much of the rest of the city in an orgiastic rite of tobogganing, snowballing (NB: not the Belushi variety, I hasten to add) and general wintry shenanigans, I was unfortunately frozen, to the point of spiritual and emotional hypothermia, elsewhere between various cogs of the UK infrastructure… It’s nice to be back.

And “back” today means back to work on a big P2P-focused project we’ll be running over the next few weeks, with interviews, podcasts, feature articles and a couple of roundtables, looking at how to operate, optimise and revolutionise P2P during good times and bad. With the 6th Procure-to-Pay Summit in Miami only a couple of weeks away we’ll be talking to the keynote speakers and some of the many P2P experts presenting at the event about the key drivers, trends, challenges and opportunities affecting this most relevant of disciplines. Keep your eyes open for top content coming out every Thursday, starting this week with an interview with Amgen’s Ramesh Krish on the application of Six Sigma methodologies to the P2P process.

On the subject of Summits: London hosts the 3rd Annual Shared Services & Outsourcing Summit next week and I’ll be onsite bringing you more interviews and presentations from this much-anticipated show. If you’ve got any questions you’d like SSON to put to the Summit’s speakers you can drop me a line and I’ll try to squeeze them in – I’ll keep you updated through some up-to-the-minute blogging throughout the event.

Before all that, however, it’s time for me to prepare and publish the roundtable debate on Latin American shared services I hosted on Friday. I’ll be putting this up as soon as I can – assuming the snow deities have been appeased – and will point you to it ASAP. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this (check the video out): enough to warm even the iciest of hearts.

Jamie

NB: You may also have noticed that the Weekly Wrap failed to rear its head on Friday. Never fear: it will return like a hyperactive phoenix this week.