The State of Sourcing

U.S. Internet users spent more time on Facebook than Yahoo and Google combined this past year (Nielsen, 2011). Following users, companies are also on track to spend 13.7 percent of their marketing budget on social media advertising (Borrell Inc. , 2012). Traditionally, small businesses advertised in local papers to drum up sales for their businesses. In the current scenario, Facebook and Twitter accounts threaten to usurp the place that newspapers had in selling the business to its readers.

Continue reading ‘Newspapers need to effectively monetize social media if they want to sustain their business’ »

There has been quite a brouhaha over the impact of tablets and e-book readers in our lives over the past couple of years. With the iPad series being the clear front-runners, the other game-changers are Amazon’s Kindle series and the Nook by Barnes & Noble. All the potential talk over how these will have a massive influence on media, marketing and publishing is explained by the fact that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have each decided to put another 4-5 million tablets each into the market in 2012.

This holiday season, consumers are looking at buying and gifting another transformational format for the media and entertainment industry – the e-book. With the foundation being built slowly over the past two years, the e-book industry is now unleashing its full marketing potential to convince tablet owners to make the “digital switch” from traditional hard covers and paperbacks to its electronic form. Amazon and B&N have already established their proprietary e-book formats and dozens of other publishers are getting on-board to digitize their output.

Continue reading ‘Holiday season cheer for publishing outsourcing with meteoric rise in demand for e-book services’ »

If you ask any energy & utilities (E&U) industry expert on the most transformational technology to hit the industry in the past five years, the resonating answer would be the smart grid. Companies and policy-makers are working round the clock to roll-out this technology on a global scale. Benefits of the smart gird are aplenty, the most important being the information extracted from each meter providing valuable insights on domestic and commercial energy consumption patterns. A long-term analysis of this data will help save power and reduce energy loads for consumers and industries alike. However, over the past couple of years, a less unsavory aspect of the grid has emerged – potential gaps in the grid for commercial hacking of the grid to disrupt the grid and steal personal information.

Our recently released report on outsourcing in the utilities space predicted a “data deluge” of sorts with the amount of information generated from smart meters attached to every home. All this information will be sent along the grid to the utility for analysis and billing purposes. To prevent misuse of this data, utilities service providers, meter/grid component manufacturers and the utility companies are collaborating with regulators such as the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and UK’s Ofgem to address security concerns and strengthen the smart grid itself through more effective security solutions.

Continue reading ‘Smart grid security measures – How worried should we be?… and other outsourcing insights’ »

Service-level agreements (SLAs) are the backbone of any system. SLAs are defined and measured to quantify IT efficiency into business value. SLAs defined between customer and vendor do not just add contractual value but ensure critical business applications are running at all times and at high levels of performance.

ValueNotes and Anunta in a recent study found that CIO/CTOs  of the banking and financial sector feel the need to improve their IT performance. However, they do not consider service level agreements important. SLAs are treated as compliance and not as an integral part of IT operations.

Continue reading ‘Negligence in monitoring SLAs hurting banking and financial sector’ »

Having done a report earlier on e-discovery and document review, which is by far the most outsourced service in the legal services outsourcing domain, our next stop was most definitely going to be outsourcing of contract management – the next big thing in outsourcing of legal services. As we started speaking with the people who deal with contracts, some of the variations and facts that came out were mind boggling. Here are some examples –

• Contracts may need up to 5-10 drafts by conservative estimates
• Contracts may need up to a year to finalize
• Contract values range from USD 10 – 1,000 million
• Hundreds of types of contracts
• Legal team sizes ranging from 6 – 1000+
• More than 40 countries across which contracts are managed by a single firm

Continue reading ‘Contract outsourcing – outsource to manage better’ »

Early last week, as I put the finishing touches on my report, “Obamacare: Outsourcing opportunities in revenue cycle management”, a social media group member put out a request for recommendations on medical coding certification programs’.  On checking out, the member came highly recommended and worked in the US healthcare industry for several years, but had been recently laid off. The post echoes the sentiment among experienced healthcare professionals who have either lost their jobs (due to medical technology) or are looking to move into the highly lucrative coding and billing industry.

Continue reading ‘Obamacare does not result in job cuts!’ »

It’s never a bad idea to invest in technology… right? Well at least many service providers of the Indian market research outsourcing industry certainly think so. Technology has always played a vital role in market research. It helps make processes more efficient, improves the quality of work, reduces errors and thus leads to lower overall costs.

Continue reading ‘MRO providers stocking up on technology?’ »

Analytics is a relatively new buzz-word in the outsourcing industry with a lot of service providers offering these services, either as a pure horizontal across industries or as a vertical specific service. With marketing services being outsourced, usually in a bundled format with customer support and other BPO offerings to “sweeten” the deal, there are elements of marketing analytics coming into the outsourcing foray. In a new HfS Research report co-authored by ValueNotes, titled ‘Where Offshore Analytics is Heading in 2011’, we have focused on the emergence of ‘horizontal’ analytics across services such as sales and marketing.

To define marketing analytics, let’s take a look at these two terms separately –

Continue reading ‘Defining Marketing Analytics’ »

“TCS eyes slice of legal process outsourcing market” – a new day, another entrant to the LPO market. The recent announcement by the CEO of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) regarding exploring of opportunities in the LPO segment should come as no surprise to players in the IT-BPO or KPO sector. The LPO market has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception, examples of which are evident through the number of players in the market currently and their growing client base spanning 3 continents.

A primary reason for Thomson Reuters’s acquisition of Pangea3 and UnitedLex’s of Lawscribe in late 2010, in my mind, was to meet growing demands by organizations and law firms alike to cut costs and increase process efficiencies. These acquisitions saw these market heavyweights expand their businesses, core strengths and the ability to offer clients additional solutions. The market is primarily serviced by pure-play providers, like CPA Global, Pangea3, UnitedLex and Mindcrest, who offer legal services as their core focus. The last 2-3 years has seen IT-BPO players entering the market to add to their top line and expand into new service areas. Their only competition is from these large pure-play providers who have established themselves globally because of their head start.

Continue reading ‘Would you like a slice of LPO pie?’ »

• Four in five publishers globally are already producing digital content
• PDF continues to be the most popular digital format, with a majority of publishers indicating that ‘universal’ accessibility was a driving factor for choosing formats
• Third-party bookstores/channels such as those offered by Amazon, Apple, Google and Sony  are preferred, but there is a growing need to develop online bookstores

These are some of the salient findings from our research on the state of digitization in the publishing world. The publishing industry underwent some drastic changes in the last couple of years – because of the global economic crisis and also, because of the rise of the digital market. This phase is also quite exciting. The report, sponsored by Qbend, has provided us with comprehensive insights on various aspects on how publishers are addressing the digital market. Based on over 200 responses from professionals working in the publishing industry, this report talks about the production, distribution, digital rights management and pricing of digital content.

Continue reading ‘New ValueNotes report: The current state of digital content’ »