Consider the Source

The Elusive World of Transaction-Based Pricing

Today’s guest blog on the transaction-based pricing comes from Dinesh Goel, Project Director, TPI.

Incentive compatibility drives value maximization, and a transaction-pricing based outsourcing model better aligns the client and provider incentives. With symbiotic gains, the marketplace will see higher traction in such pricing arrangements, and the shift is only a question of time.

Effort-based pricing has been the popular sourcing choice thus far. In principle, the client pays the service provider on the basis of the full time equivalent (FTE) employee (time and material), location(offshore or onshore), skill and level.

Contact Center Offshoring: Putting the Brand at Risk?

Today's guest blog is from Mike McMenamin, practice leader, Contact Center Advisory Services, TPI.

A popular cocktail conversation topic these days is culture shock experienced during exchanges with foreign customer support center representatives. The language nuances are fodder for both humor and frustration, and case for offshoring skepticism. Countless consumer-oriented businesses are resisting offshoring services for fear that the backlash from consumers will tarnish their brands.

The Chemistry of IT Outsourcing

Today's guest blog on IT outsourcing is from Mike Slavin, Partner and Managing Director, CIO Services North America, TPI.

It’s the speed, not the volume.

When it comes to managing the cost and effort of using new technology in a sourcing solution, the overall level of technology doesn’t matter nearly as much as the pace of technology’s evolution and frequency of change. To stay one step ahead, an organization has to have a well-developed sourcing strategy and a plan to manage the sourced environment.

The Precision of Terms – The Service Delivery Family

In a prior blog, I outlined a few of the phrases and terms that people use to refer to outsourcing and offshoring from a strategic context. Today, I want to dig into the more specific words that are used to discuss outsourcing and offshoring.

Here we go …

It’s a Sourced World After All: Scenarios for a Recession

Sid Pai’s recent blog on a likely U.S. slump led me to conclude: Globalization means that contagion spreads quickly and broadly -- a large country’s pain causes the world to ache -- and the resulting economic fallout induces near-sightedness in senior executives. Recession leads to shifts in outsourcing trends, in turn requiring realignment of IT and business process strategies to take into account newly created risks and opportunities.

SHORT-TERM SLOWDOWN?

Today's blog on the effect that a U.S. recession could have on the outsourcing industry is by Siddharth A Pai, Partner & Managing Director, TPI India.

Despite the subprime crisis, most commentators, self included, doubted predictions of a U.S. recession a few months ago.  This confidence has steadily eroded. Concern about the global economy is mounting - the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has slashed its forecast for U.S. growth and warned that no country will be immune from a "global slowdown."  The U.S. Federal Reserve has announced stimulus packages of over $150bn and is cutting interest rates.

The Precision of Terms – The Strategic Domain

Have you noticed just how diverse the set of phrases and terms are that people use to refer to outsourcing and offshoring? Well, a few colleagues and I decided it was time to convey the commonly-accepted meanings for many of the more popular phrases we encounter in our work. 

Climbing the Charts: Business Resiliency

Irony prevailed last week. I was returning from delivering a speech in Florida - a review of “marketplace trends and issues” with senior IT finance directors – when the news of the undersea cable outage in the Mediterranean made the airwaves.  I first learned of the issue by reading press releases from a few service providers that screamed, “Our services are not affected!”

Renewal Strategies for ITO Relationships

An ITO relationship will stand the test of time with a well-designed sourcing strategy and supporting contract. Sounds like motherhood, but the “well designed” aspect generally relates to anticipating classes of change that will occur during the term. 

During the past several years, TPI has advised on renewal strategies and associated negotiations for many of the larger ITO agreements signed in the 1995-1999 period. While these agreements were awarded to differing service providers, most of them ran to term without undue litigation or termination. Sure, there were areas of unfulfilled expectations, but the level of satisfaction through these first-generation agreements is usually quite high.