The Perfect Storm for IT Outsourcing
As I present to outsourcing audiences on the book tour, they pick up on several new services markets the book outlines – Accenture’s Mobility Operated Services. Cognizant being involved in the clinical tests for the high-profile H1N1 vaccine last year. Appriro’s various Social CRM projects. Wipro’s product engineering services as “buyer” organizations embed more and [...]
Three Views: Looking Forward and Looking Back in Procurement BPO (Part 2)
In the first installment of this series, I shared perspectives from Everest Research (courtesy of Supply and Demand Chain Executive) and Horses for Sources on the emerging procurement BPO market. Now, here at Spend Matters we won’t claim to know as much as Everest does about broader adoption trends in overall F&A BPO (let alone [...]
Beroe: Rising to Meet Category and Market Intelligence Needs (Part 2)
In the first post in this series examining Beroe’s approach to delivering category and market intelligence offerings to procurement organizations, I provided a high-level summary of the firm and its approaches. In today’s continuation, I’ll take the topic down a few levels by getting into the type of insight and actionable intelligence that third-party knowledge [...]
Three Ingredients Missing in the Procurement BPO Secret Sauce
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the past few months digging into different procurement BPO models. In general, I’ve been moderately to seriously impressed with the level of process innovation that many firms aren’t just claiming, but actually introducing into their client bases. Still, a number of things appear to be missing, especially [...]
Private (Cloud) Phantasies
I am hearing plenty of conversations around private clouds. The basic theme is “we will virtualize our processing and storage and get many of the benefits of public clouds”. And, of course, “we will have none of the security and service level issues with public clouds.” Incumbent application vendors encourage that thinking as a way [...]
Travel Tuesday: The End of Business Class and Other Tales — Is Corporate Travel Changing for Good?
A fundamental challenge of indirect and services procurement is that we?re often asked to make sourcing decisions — not to mention negotiating with and managing suppliers — based on historic data that may or may not reflect future demands and requi…
Building a Lean Six Sigma and Process Excellence Culture
Not surprisingly, this conference is as much or more about the cultural aspects of LSS as the techniques and tools, and Jason Schulist of DTE Energy (a US utility company) gave a presentation on their continuous improvement journey. They’ve been at LSS for more than 10 years, starting with Kaizen in 1998, moving into Six [...]
Are Outsourcing Vendors Throwing in the High-Value BPO Towel?
Over on Horses for Sources, entrepreneur-turned-stealth-researcher Phil Fersht* recently suggested that some big-name outsourcing firms might be tossing in the towel when it comes to selling and delivering higher value offerings that focus more on pr…
The scary side of freelancing: the inadvertent freelancer
Not every freelancer is one by choice. The economy has thrust millions into the freelance economy. Technology can help some of them but what about the inadvertent freelancer? Who’s helping them?
Filling a Research Void: Spend Matters Compass (Part 2)
Last week, I introduced Spend Matters readers to Spend Matters Compass, a new research offering that we’re launching on the site later today. One of the major purposes behind Spend Matters Compass, besides providing deeper research and analysis for f…
