Guy Kirkwood's Blog (7)

Following my missive about the TPI results, Les Potton, one of my contacts and owner of Target HR, wrote:

The irony is that the potential savings from outsourcing could be a key route through the recession, but its the reluctance to commit funds up front or sign long term deals, that is likely to be contributing to the reduced number of contracts.…

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I've been banging on about the provision of services (BPO and ITO) over the cloud. As we see increased consolidation amongst the hardware manufacturers and their generally smaller services brethren, the news yesterday that Perot Systems is being acquired for a 68% premium by Dell raises questions; and eyebrows.



Perot is still strong in the US, but its European business has suffered death from a… Continue

I've been giving a lot of thought into why clients and outsourcing service providers fall out and I think that in most cases, it comes down to different expectations; i.e. each party provides misaligned inputs leading to misaligned outcomes.



I've talked before about how outsourcing is mostly about guessing. The service BPO/ITO provider guesses what the client wants and what the competitive organisations are going to charge. The client in turn guesses what services are going to be… Continue

There is a quiet revolution taking place in the legal market. At the moment, it is being kept hush hush because lawyers in the US, Australia and the UK are moving some of their "turn the handle" grunty back-office processes offshore - mainly to India. Of course, the reason they're keeping it quiet is that they're still charging top dollar/pound/euro to clients for these same services.



So far, so capitalist.



But, corporates are getting in on the act. As Matt Sullivan has… Continue

At last, some realism is leaking into the market; fetid and rank it may be, but like all good boils, this one really needs lancing.



The latest research from TPI does not make happy reading for the outsourcing service provider and sourcing advisory/consulting communities. The message is simple; information technology outsourcing (ITO) is in the dolrums and business process outsourcing (BPO) has fallen off a cliff.



Providers have returned woeful results. Total contract… Continue

It is my estimation that, unless one’s involvement is peripheral, nobody survives a war; the people who come out the other side are not those who went in. Oh, I know, we all change, every day, and each morning emerge from our cocoon of sleep a different person, to confront an unutterably alien face, and any illness, and all shocks, age and change us by their given degrees… yet when an illness is past or the shock faded, we rejoin, more or less, the same society that we left, and…

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There is a conspiracy in the UK between politicians. No surprise there, you might think; but this affects us as individuals, companies and the outsourcing market generally.



The conspiracy revolves around the number ten.



Whilst the Conservative Party has admitted that its spending cuts will amount to an across the board ten per cent, it says that it is using Labour’s figures to calculate this. Labour in its turn, says that it will not cut but will go for “zero per cent… Continue