This is an interesting article which appeared on Harvard Business Review
Here is an extract
"It wasn’t easy, but over the past two decades business embraced the offshore outsourcing of various functions, including laborious back-office tasks, call-center activities, and routine business processes. Now a more cerebral function – decision making – is being added to the offshore services menu, as third-party providers structure decision alternatives, analyze data, and recommend or even take courses of action.
Are businesses really ready to outsource their thinking? The answer may depend on how much confidence-building experience they have had with analytics generally, since third-party decision making is an analytics-intensive undertaking.
The trend began quietly in the mid-1990s, at General Electric’s captive offshore center in India. Though the center was set up to do back-office work, managers realized that employees there could also help with decision algorithms. Soon the operation had become the primary provider of decision tools for credit and risk analysis. When GE sold a stake in its offshore unit in 2004, the resulting company, Genpact, began to take on decision analysis for other clients.
Today several other offshore firms – Mu Sigma, MarketRX (acquired by Cognizant in 2007), and Inductis – also specialize in decision analysis; their clients include some of the largest U.S.-based fi rms. They’re helping a major retailer to decide where to build new stores, a large auto insurance company to set rates for different customer subsets, a pharmaceutical giant to decide how to deploy its salespeople, and a leading office products retailer to decide which promotions and products to offer to which customers. Even large offshore vendors that previously specialized in IT, such as Cognizant, TCS, and Infosys, are beginning to develop an expertise in decision making."
You can read the full story here
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