Clear Outsourcing Adoption Curve Emerges
 The IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest convened sourcing thought leaders from global enterprises, world-class outsourcing providers and IDC’s leading analysts in Chicago September 11-12, 2006. They shared pioneering experiences that are pushing the transformational boundaries of outsourcing, one of the most important management practices to emerge in the 21st century. Case studies from the Williams Companies, AOL, Lucent, Barry-Wehmiller and Procter & Gamble explained how to use outsourcing to satisfy multifaceted business objectives, and a clear adoption curve is emerging that describes how outsourcing is reshaping the world’s largest organizations.
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Surprising Manufacturing Case Study Featured at IDC Outsourcing Forum shows how outsourcing is creating more onshore manufacturing jobs.
 Readers of U.S. and European press are too familiar with the plight of manufacturers—and how outsourcing is increasing cost pressures and sending even more jobs overseas. What is less known is that leading edge manufacturers are beginning to use outsourcing to increase local employment by making local companies more competitive.
Forum attendees will hear how Midwest U.S. manufacturer Barry-Wehmiller, which was featured in BusinessWeek’s The Future of Outsourcing, is creating a new business that turns around manufacturers by improving their business processes, which makes them more competitive and ends up increasing local employment in many cases. Forum presenter Vasant Bennett is President of Barry-Wehmiller International Resources (BMIS) and a chief architect of BWIS’s emerging service offerings. He spoke to the Global Human Capital Journal last week.
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Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
Midwest executives will have an excellent opportunity to learn how to take their outsourcing strategy to the next level next week, when IDC will bring their Outsourcing Forum to Chicago. Themed “Reinventing your business through BPO and ITO,” the Forum will feature speakers from Proctor & Gamble, Lucent, The Williams Companies, NiSource, Goodyear, Barry-Wehmiller and Hydro One Networks. In addition, world-class outsourcing providers such as Capgemini, IBM, Hewlett-Packard will offer practical advice, and several of IDC’s lead analysts will offer their insights.
I was able to catch up with event chairman Bob Welch, who previewed some of the Summit’s key themes. I also have information on a special registration deal.
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Accelerating Forces Buffet the Enterprise
Volatility of customer wants and diversity of markets around the world will increasingly demand that enterprises innovate if they want to remain relevant because their current product introduction and innovation processes are woefully insufficient. In addition, several “structural enablers” are driving down the cost of collaboration—globalization, enterprise software maturation, e-collaboration tools and BPM solutions. I think it’s beyond dispute that “emerging” markets around the world look at India as a model, and there will be a cascading wave of new outsourcing providers entering the market in the years ahead, keeping downward pressure on supplier prices and forcing increased innovation across the supplier value chain. For example, many educated young people in these markets are native with e-collaboration tools, which should lead to new models of collaboration. SOA and Web services are increasingly ingrained in enterprise software, opening up legacy and new solutions to web-based, granular sharing of information. BPM, because it digitizes an increasing spectrum of the business process, is an enabler of outsourcing.
Reposition Outsourcing as Iterative Transformation
Outsourcing in 2006 is where e-business was in 1998, when the Internet was a tech playground in the mid-late 90s. The mission of “e-business strategy” was […]
The emerging knowledge economy will reconfigure the role of discovery in innovation in some surprising ways. First, a couple corollaries:
For most of the history of mankind, information has been scarce, and an important way that people innovated was through discovery. In agrarian and industrial economies, it was extremely important to discover new ways to transform raw materials in order to create new products. Since people lived in relative isolation compared to today, there was significant duplication of discovery efforts in pockets around the world. The pervasive TCP/IP network (i.e. Internet), combined with accelerating adoption of modern architectural approaches (i.e. service-oriented architecture) and messaging (Web services and XML) is unlocking the world’s data/information as a dizzying pace. It’s a cliché that we have too much information, and this trend shows no sign of abating. Moreover, software tools for automating the management of information are improving all the time. Of course, this development gives people an unprecedented ability to collaborate—on everything.
In the knowledge economy, discovery gets leveraged, pervasively and instantaneously. Discovery will remain extremely important to creating value, but I’m going to argue that it will play a cameo role in the hyper-innovation knowledge economy: crucial but supporting.
Anyone attending […]
Adam Hartung of Spark Partners led a compelling and thought-provoking discussion at this month’s MITEF meeting on 14 March in Chicago. Adam is a veteran of a bevy of management consultancies and large corporations who has spent the last four years researching a hypothesis about innovation, writing a book (The Phoenix Principle) and consulting. His observations are straightforward, profound and potentially healing for industrial economy companies.
Summary of the Meeting and Discussion “Lock-in” is a corporate phenomenon that is fatal for organizations because it prevents new thinking. New thinking is increasingly important because the market is more volatile than ever. Lock-in happens in a cycle: in its formative stage, the corporation experiences success, and success “hardens” into a success formula; it leaves an imprint on executives, workers and customers, who all identify with the success. Of course, the problem arises when the market moves and nullifies some key assumptions that are embedded in the success formula. There are three types of lock-in:
Behavioral lock-in: group-think, not invented here; slow decision making; rigid ideas about customers and products; sacred cows. Profits from financial manipulation. Structural lock-in: many, but one stood out–“biased toward easily quantified, traditional actions and against more speculative […]
At the MIT Enterprise Forum’s Innovation and Technology Forecast in Chicago Tuesday, there was significant discussion about China’s growth and what that would mean for innovation in Illinois. Many speakers also made references to the importance of catering to knowledge workers. Chunka Mui, Dan Ratner, Geoffrey Kasselman and Jerry Mitchell were panelists, and Jerry spends significant time in China. His admiration for what is happening in China was contagious and triggered the train of thought here.
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The current revolution in enterprise software is only a preview of a much larger, more pervasive shift that will transform the global economy within the next decade. Service-oriented architecture and Web services are two of the more well-known elements of the maturation of distributed computing, which is changing the rules of the vaunted software development life cycle.
In short, we are on the way to becoming a real-time market for global human capital whose ascendancy will increase with the growth of the knowledge economy and global standards for work processes. If we classify economic value according to knowledge/information, manufacturing and agricultural products and services, the knowledge portion has been steadily increasing its share of the value chain, and this trend is accelerating. Of course, information technology facilitates the creation, distribution and sharing of knowledge.
What does this mean for outsourcing and offshoring? By understanding how standards-based technologies have combined to transform enterprise software, we can learn how the coming standardization of work processes will drive explosive demand for an always-on market for knowledge workers and real-time value chains.
Read a longer version of the article published in the Technology Executives Club Journal. Forthcoming next month, my point of view […]
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