A recent survey conducted by Accenture and the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network found that 2/3rds of respondents believe conversations with customers and providers about IT performance focus too much on SLAs, and not enough on business outcomes. No news here…after all, the industry has only been talking about managing…
A recent morning paper reported that telecoms giant Orange, who are outsourcing their call center services to IBM in the Philippines, told their night-shift call center employees in Darlington that if they want to keep their jobs they would need to move to Manila. Orange reportedly offered these employees a…
Over at CIO Update, John Hughes has recently written some advice for CIOs (Somewhere Between Abdication and Control Freak) that, coincidentally, is quite relevant for those charged with managing suppliers delivering services on an outsourced basis. The premise is that an optimal solution for leadership exists somewhere between completely abdicating…
Three recent reports, relating to each of the US, the UK and the EMEA region, revealed that the private sector has increased its spending on outsourced services during 2010 and the first quarter of 2011. A report by Gartner on US businesses’ IT spending indicates that 3.1% more was spent…
Cloud-based services give new meaning to the IT holy grail of “cheaper, better, faster” in the right circumstances. You might not even have to settle for just two. But it is important not to let the Cloud fog your thinking when it comes to configuring mission-critical IT-enabled services: adequate failover…
In our prior blog, Outsourcing Pricing and Implied Productivity we discussed the value of having a reverse engineered pricing model to evaluate supplier pricing. The idea is that by creating transparency into supplier pricing based on the factors of production (i.e., hardware, software, facilities, labor and margin) a rational pricing…
Providers are rushing head-first into the cloud revolution, marketing their latest cloud offerings and promoting the benefits of hosting data externally. To The Cloud–Start-up–Windows 7 by windows-videos But as customers analyze whether the cloud is the right fit for their technology and data, they need to carefully review whether the…
On Friday, April 22, Pillsbury hosted a meeting of the Washington, DC, chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA-DC). Dr. Ramaswamy Chandramouli, Group Chair of the NIST Cloud Computing Security Working Group addressed members of CSA-DC representing local businesses, government agencies and various consulting and law firms regarding the work…
In Outsourcing Pricing and Implied Productivity, we discussed the advantages of understanding the underlying staff productivity assumptions in a supplier’s solution and pricing. What are the key IT infrastructure productivity measures that underpin a supplier’s price? We’ve found that in medium to large, full service infrastructure outsourcing deals, a few…
“Are you serious?” It’s a question we often feel like asking clients after they tell us they expect a service level of at least “four nines” from suppliers because that’s what they believe they are achieving. Yet many times, the client doesn’t have the historical performance information necessary to support…