- Strategic Outsourcing - Current Practices and Future Expectations
16 Nov 04 | Single Topic Reports
Strategic outsourcing has become one of the premier tools that upper-level management uses to shape and streamline its businesses to meet the growing competitive pressures of recent years. In May to August 2003, CSC studied this trend toward increased outsourcing in Europe by surveying board-level executives from the top 250 European-owned companies. This report is based on that survey.
This approach has the advantage of giving a clear understanding of the perspectives of European business leaders at a specific point in time. Other European strategic outsourcing studies are based on composite data, compiled across the different markets in Europe in different ways at different times.
This is the first report to give a ‘snapshot view’ of the strategic outsourcing activities of Europe’s biggest companies.
- The Future of Outsourcing - Part 2: The Innovation Agenda
25 May 04 | Presentation
In the second of his two web conferences, Francis Hayden will draw on his research into The Future of Outsourcing to address the factors that impact the success of innovation in outsourcing deals. Whilst innovation is often sought, clients frequently struggle to realise their expectations.
Within ´innovation´ we include not just the big exciting breakthroughs but everything for which the outcome is not known in advance. And this is the management challenge; is it possible to structure a deal that aligns the interests of the supplier with those of the customer so that they can work together on the exploration and exploitation of potentially valuable opportunities?
It may be a bigger challenge for managers, but in our view, making innovation successful holds the secret to truly productive and value-creating relationships. Francis´ research indicates that the challenge can be overcome and once the underlying principles become well understood we predict the emergence of a new model, something we call Dynamic Outsourcing. Francis will discuss this model in the concluding part of this web conference.
- Innovation in Outsourcing
26 Apr 04 | Presentation
Businesses are increasingly looking to outsourcing as a way to introduce more innovation whilst remaining competitive. The problem is that conventional ways of thinking about outsourcing are very anti-innovation. Innovation is often squeezed out by the very process that was supposed to encourage it.
In this presentation, Francis Hayden:
- Analyses the contradictions inherent in conventional approaches to outsourcing.
- Examines the peculiarities of innovation and successful approaches to managing it.
- Identifies the conceptual and structural changes necessary to make outsourced functions more innovative.
- Illustrates the emergence of a new form of ´Dynamic´ outsourcing in which innovation is a central objective.
See event: Stimulating Innovation in Challenging Times (25-27 April 2004) - The Future of Outsourcing: Expectations and Elephant Traps - Part 1: The Improvement Agenda
30 Mar 04 | Presentation
This web conference covered:
- The focus on costs and the budgeting trap
- The myth of partnership and the need for explicit rewards
- A balanced, objectives-driven approach to outsourcing
- Offshore Outsourcing: Cheaper, Faster, Better or a Cheap, Fast Bet?
2 Feb 04 | Position Papers
There is no quick or easy path to offshore outsourcing success.
Those expecting a quick win are sure to be disappointed – there will be no overnight cost benefits.
The companies that are now outsourcing offshore successfully have spent years building experience and relationships with their overseas providers.
It can take one to three years (depending on your level of experience) before the savings exceed the incremental costs of establishing successful offshore relationships.
- Making outsourcing work
13 Nov 02 | Presentation
Outsourcing can deliver significant business benefits to organisations if approached correctly.
However, all too often long-term outsourcing contracts are designed with short-term objectives in mind.
This mismatch can lead to soured relationships, failed projects and an inability to innovate.
In this discussion, we explore ways of ensuring that your outsourcing relationships succeed. We develop a simple and powerful framework to think through all the dimensions of the collaboration that may be important in achieving that objective.
The framework can be used at the beginning of an outsourcing project, in order to ensure it works well from the start, or to improve an existing relationship.
Read full event details - The secret of successful outsourcing
1 Nov 02 | Journal Articles
Outsourcing can be a very effective way of importing new expertise and offloading the responsibility for things that are not core to the business. In the realm of IT, outsourcing has been demonstrated to provide improvements in service, reductions in cost, and inputs of much needed investment (not usually all at the same time) but our research shows that the road to this sunny upland can be bumpy.Many of the biggest outsourcing relationships – even the ones that eventually go on to become very valuable – can go into a steep decline shortly after the transfer and bottom out in a crisis that can lead to complete breakdown. In the successful cases, the partners reinvent the relationship but it seems extraordinary that after all the energy they put into constructing the deal in the first place, such a reinvention should be necessary.
- Partnering in the new economy: the Myth, the Magic and the Misery - 2001 Forum Summary
1 Apr 01 | Event Summary Reports
The latest annual CSC survey of CIOs worldwide revealed that their current most pressing concern is collaboration – with customers, suppliers, and industry partners.
This reflects the shift from the internal provision of business services to forming external partnerships in order to accomplish a host of flexible, cost-effective new initiatives.
In the networked economy, companies are increasingly turning to partners to help them deliver what customers want, and to move into areas opened up by new technologies. Unfortunately, although alliances are increasingly vital to business success, the majority of business partnerships fail.
It was to discuss why this should be, and what can be done to avoid it, that CSC Research Services’ clients and experts met in St. Andrews, Scotland with leading authorities and practitioners in the field.
- Managing IT vendor relationships
1 Mar 00 | Journal Articles
‘Creative collaboration’ is as a key characteristic of a strong partnership. This type of partnership demands powerful synergy between individuals who share their knowledge to solve a significant issue or design something completely new. As companies race to discover winning e-business formulae, we have been conducting further research into how our sponsors manage this type of ‘journey into the unknown’ with their chosen partners. We have also looked in more detail at how you handle the other types of vendor relationships that we identified in our previous article, those based on ‘coordinated co-working’ and ‘contracted choice’. How do you collaborate with your vendors to generate new ideas while also sustaining commercial relationships, often with the same vendors, for standard ongoing services and commodity products? We provide practical guidance on how to analyse and document each type of relationship. We also explain the integrated management structure that is needed in order to derive maximum value from your portfolio of IT vendors.
- Partnering with your IT vendors
1 Nov 99 | Journal Articles
IT vendors are increasingly being seen as partners in an attempt to avoid contractual issues. We have taken a closer look at the nature of partnership and how to make it work for you and your vendors. This is particularly important as according to Morgan Chambers, an IT outsourcing consultancy in the UK, nearly 70 percent of their clients say they are unhappy with one or more aspects of their suppliers.