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.

Anything that CAN go Wrong…

I’ve never been a big fan of Murphy’s Law (by which I mean a big believer in its accuracy – obviously I’m not a fan of ineluctable negative consequences) especially following my resolution to follow Monty Python’s advice and always look on the bright side of life, but something happened this week which really knocked my new-found faith in an essentially benevolent fate into the most cocked of hats. Let the following tale of woe be a lesson to all in shared services, outsourcing, journalism and beyond…

Last week confidence in the UK economy (and sterling in particular), already lower than a particularly ambitious limbo dancer, took another battering thanks to some particularly brutal comments from Jim Rogers, investor and one-time partner of George Soros. Rogers, in superbly damning form, told Bloomberg:  “I would urge you to sell any sterling you might have. It’s finished. I hate to say it, but I would not put any money in the UK”.

These comments were seized upon by the UK’s press, including the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston – whose standing seems to rise in diametric opposition to the value of UK Plc – and of course contributed significantly to the general sense of resigned terror pervading much of the country at present.

So what did I do? Obviously, I reached out for an interview with the man behind the words. A quick bit of research (ok, Google) yielded a website and thence a contact email address for Rogers; I sent off an interview request and sat back to await what I expected would be a polite but firm rebuff (leading financial lights at the moment tend to be rather busy, I know not why).

But – wonders to behold! – instead of said rebuff I received an email on Monday informing me that Rogers was available RIGHT NOW for an interview and instructing me to call a hotel room somewhere in the Middle East (not just any random hotel room, obviously. I gave that up years ago…).

So I rang, and proceeded to conduct a relatively short but immensely gripping interview with Rogers, whose views on sterling as expressed to me were if anything even more savage than those quoted by Bloomberg, and who had some fascinatingly condemnatory opinions on the US and UK governments, bankers and many others. Verbal gold-dust: this was, truly, great stuff, and when we said our goodbyes at the end of the interview I couldn’t wait to transcribe and publish what I was sure was at the very least a Pulitzer-quality encounter. Frost/Nixon, eat yer respective hearts out.

And then along comes Murphy with his long arm: playing the sound file of the recording of the interview I was initially puzzled, and then very promptly devastated, to find that somehow the cable connecting my PC and my recording equipment had become detached. My interview, my one record of an immeasurably illuminating encounter, was a silence so profound you could hear the angels laughing – and of course, being such a digital native, I had placed total faith in my equipment and hadn’t taken a single note…

Jim, if you’re out there: I’m sorry for wasting your time. Everyone else: that distant glugging sound you can hear is me crying into a bucket.

Jamie

PS: I also tried getting an interview with Alan Greenspan. Here’s the response I got from his representative:

“Dr. Greenspan appreciates your interest; however, owing to the demands on his time he will have to regret.” [sic]

I’m guessing those regrets ARE the demands on his time. And, if not, why not?

The Bird is the Word

As regular readers will be aware, I have forsworn doom and gloom this year, having been persuaded by Dan Gardner that being scared of anything apart from diabetes and asteroid collisions is futile (that may be a slightly erroneous interpretation of an excellent book but you’ll have to read it to confirm your suspicions…). However, waking up to the news today, as with many other days recently, proved a distressing experience: job cuts in what sounded like more countries than actually exist on earth, apparently Blue Chip share prices going down so far they rewrite the rules of arithmetic, and here in the UK “official” confirmation that the country is now in recession (in the same way that the Titanic was only “officially” sunk when the movie came out).

So I’ve been more than usually receptive to anything mood-lightening today – hence this – and I was delighted to receive this little beauty of a PowerPoint presentation, courtesy of my colleague Jolie Newman whose latest eAlerts will have hit subscribers’ inboxes by the time you read this (and if you’re not a subscriber, why not??? You can sign up here). Jolie in turn picked it up from the marvellous Naomi Bloom, Managing Partner at Bloom & Wallace, who has this to say about its origins:

“I wish I had created it — but I didn’t.  I also have absolutely no idea where I got it, but it seems to come around a couple of times a year.  My suggestion is that you attribute me as the send of a presentation for which we don’t know the author but would love to hear from him/her so that we can give credit where it’s due.  Perhaps the author will seek me out so that I can say thank you.”

So: anyone out there who knows where this fine assessment of management strategy comes from, please do enlighten us – let me know.

I was also amused – although in a much darker, hand-wringingly diabolical, hitching-one’s-pony-to-the-Schadenfreude-Express kind of way – by the priorities of former Merril Lynch CEO John Thain as he watched the pillars of his world tumble down – as explained here by resident CNN genius commentator Campbell Brown. $1,400 for a wastebasket? Does really sum it all up, doesn’t it?

Have a spectacular weekend.

Jamie

NB: today’s Weekly Wrap podcast is up after a few technical glitches – namely my having to record it twice due to, er, human error. You can listen here – enjoy!

Shared History

As I write this, the teeming multitudes have gathered, the air is gravid with anticipation, and the world stands on the brink of something truly remarkable. Unfortunately, as I wrote in my last post, I’m unable to make it to Krakow and SSON’s 3rd Shared Services Central & Eastern Europe event; however I’m there in spirit, and meanwhile there’s plenty on www.ssonetwork.com to keep me occupied. Oh, yeah, and something’s going on in Washington apparently; I’ll check the news later.

This morning I interviewed the forthright – and hilarious – Graham White, HR Director at Westminster City Council about that august institution’s HR transformation program (you can check out that podcast on the site from tomorrow evening) and about the impact of the financial crisis on HR, and the future of the function over the next few years (which you can hear in Friday’s Weekly Wrap). Graham – who gave a truly barnstorming presentation at last summer’s HR Transformation event in London, slides from which he’s promised me will be arriving at Castle SSON in the next couple of days – told me he wants to debate the pros and cons of business partners with Dave Ulrich and made it pretty clear he thought it would be a fiery encounter. Dave, if you’re reading this: I think a gauntlet has been thrown down…

Today I’ve also been reviewing some of your responses to the SSON survey – absolutely crucial feedback which has given us some vital pointers for content for 2009 (one or two rather bizarre answers, but then variety is the spice of not only life but the psychiatric profession as well). I wanted to say thanks for your efforts in this survey – and also to remind you that feedback needn’t be limited to an annual effort: if you’ve got ideas for content, interview subjects etc, what are you waiting for?

Jamie

PS: A quick reminder: our Job Board is formally launched tomorrow. For more information check out the official news release or go straight to the Board and start jobseeking or hiring according to your particular needs…

PPS: I was only joking about not knowing what was going on in Washington. It’s the do-it-yourself Bloody Mary special at the Capitol Lounge, of course.

To Be In Krakow, Now Winter’s There

Next week sees the third edition of SSON’s Shared Services Central & Eastern Europe event, to be held in delightful Krakow, Poland. The region is, of course, a crucial one for the sourcing space, being not only the nearshore option for many Western European organisations but also a location of choice for global sourcing providers and, increasingly, the site of a number of centres serving growing local firms.

Unfortunately, due to having been born under a star so bad it breaks telescopes, I won’t be attending the event in person, forgoing the myriad pleasures of the “spiritual heart of Poland” for those of, er, the office. However, the SSON team in an attempt to re-gruntle me have promised me plenty of interviews and those all-important presentations with which to festoon the website over the coming weeks, so keep your eyes and ears open (unless you’re reading this in a haboob, in which case I advise the opposite – and best of luck to you).

Meanwhile, for a preview of what’s shaping up to be a fantastic event, check out my chat with conference director Niamh Byrne in this week’s Weekly Wrap podcast – which also looks at some of SSON members’ responses to the ongoing Satyam scandal.

(On the subject of Satyam here is a rather contrived and, to be frank, weak-as-hell joke an unnamed network member told me yesterday. Apologies in advance.

Q. What’s the difference between a traffic cop giving a ticket to a carload of chefs, and Ramalinga Raju?

A. One books the cooks and another cooks the books.

Ha. Ha. Ha.)

Another big event for SSON next week is the official launch of the network’s job board. I won’t say too much about this now but suffice it to say we’re going to be going live with some very tasty positions in a variety of locations, and going forward will be attracting the very best jobs (and job seekers) worldwide to one handy site. Keep your eye on http://www.ssonetwork.com/jobs.aspx and our weekly Gateway next week if you’re hiring, moving on or just window-shopping.

That’s it for this week. Normally I’d be signing off with something boisterous and potentially deafening, but January this year in the life of an editor is a time for turning one’s back on the wiles of Bacchus, so I will leave you with this and wish you a superlative and life-affirming weekend.

Jamie

Short and Sweet

A quickie today: as the Satyam scandal continued to unfold yesterday, I received an email from Bill Bierce of Bierce & Kenerson:

“This shock wave will probably lead to some good changes in the BPO industry.   BPO service providers will be scrutinized by investors, buyers, employees, suppliers and regulators for compliance.  This will result in further differentiation of BPO providers by the quality and transparency of their corporate governance, risk management and compliance culture.

“BPO buyers will not also focus on new issues in selection and contracting for BPO services.   Of course, there is no assurance that even criminal laws and Sarbanes-Oxley-type laws will prevent abuses of trust and financial frauds.”

Well, that seemed like a good start – so today I thought I’d get a bit more insight into Bill’s thoughts on India’s biggest corporate fraud, and we ended up having a very enjoyable chat which – because you’re worth it – I’ve put up as a podcast here. As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Must dash: I’ve got to go and fabricate a billion dollars. Anyone know a respectable auditor?

Jamie