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.
Tags: crisis, downturn, economic, focus, goats, Hackett, Outsourcing, P2P, Shared Services, sharedservices, sourcing, SSON, summit
