The State of Sourcing

This is the third blog post in a nine-part series detailing the various services and sub-services within select segments in the KPO industry. The last blog post presented the service offerings in the Analytics segment. In this blog post, we discuss the services and sub-services offered by LPO service providers. The segments we will be covering are listed in the exhibit “KPO segments”.

We believe that a clear delineation of which sub-service belongs under which service category is imperative. Buyers are often confused as to what constitutes a complete value-chain for a segment, and which sub-services are offered by a service provider in a certain service offering.

Continue reading ‘The LPO service guide’ »

This is the second blog post in a nine-part series detailing the various services and sub-services within select segments in the KPO industry. The first blog post presented the service offerings in the Publishing Outsourcing KPO segment. In this blog post, we discuss the services and sub-services offered by Analytics service providers. The segments we will be covering are listed in the exhibit “KPO segments”.

We believe that a clear delineation of which sub-service belongs under which service category is imperative. Buyers often are confused as to what constitutes a complete value-chain for a segment, and which sub-services can be expected by a service provider in a certain service offering.

Continue reading ‘The Analytics service guide’ »

Over the next couple of weeks, ValueNotes will be releasing a series of blog posts detailing the various services and sub-services within select segments in the KPO industry. The segments we will be covering are listed in the exhibit “KPO segments”.

This post focuses on the Publishing Outsourcing segment. The variety of service providers in this space is large. However, what one provider may classify as a content service, another might classify as a technology service. There also exist services which only niche service providers’ offer, and that a large or multi-service provider might want to contemplate including in their portfolio offerings. Continue reading ‘The Publishing Outsourcing service guide’ »

Outsourcing in the services sector has been happening for the past couple of decades, with a slew of information technology (ITO) and business processes (BPO) getting outsourced to global locations. Over the past 8 to 10 years, there has been considerable interest in the market for knowledge processes outsourcing (KPO). These critical and high-end services are the most recent entrants in the outsourcing space. In order to understand more about the KPO industry, my team and I spoke to decision makers from the buyer and vendor communities to gather opinions and gain insights. This preliminary exercise brought us a varied spectrum of insights on aspects such as industry challenges, vendor concerns, segmental growth rates, end customer segments et al.

What we know so far is that the evolution of the KPO industry was very distinct from that of the ITO and the BPO market. After these two services were outsourced, service providers enquired about further needs for outsourcing services. Trust built over the years from existing outsourcing relationships brought high-end, value-added work on the sourcing table. This work was not heavily dependent on the location of the delivery team and it involved a higher level of judgment and rigorous methodologies by smaller teams. The nature of work was more sophisticated and involved a higher degree of partnership and collaboration. To sum up, the KPO industry involves complex processes, requires insights and analysis based on skills and judgment, require people with a higher education background and specialized knowledge, and the end results can vary from provider to provider. The list of key KPO segments is illustrated in exhibit 1.

Continue reading ‘Where does the KPO industry stand? A few observations on its evolution so far’ »

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!’ »