Author Archives: ISG
Perhaps your organization has a contract already in place with a service provider, and you are thinking those pre-negotiated contract terms and conditions might save you time and money in sourcing the next area of your business. Or perhaps your organization decides that skipping a competitive process and sourcing directly with one service provider will be more efficient. Of course, sole-sourced contracts can be successful, but these Top 5 suggestions remind us that a competitive solicitation process delivers increased knowledge … More
Welcome back! If you’re just joining us for this two part series, click here to read Part 1. All companies have a minimum of two levels (tiers) of suppliers – Tier One (directly contracted suppliers) or Tier Two (suppliers to the Tier One suppliers). Large companies do a fairly good job of assessing their risk exposure to Tier One suppliers during the initial assessment and contracting process. Usually, little if any review of Tier Two suppliers occurs at this stage. … More
Global supply chains are constantly exposed to risk, ranging from disruptions of continuity to various levels of operational destruction. Risks can include weather, significant cost variances, resource availability, legislative/tax changes, logistical disruption, power outages and health epidemics, and usually occur without warning. Most supply chain management functions, even in the most advanced companies, are ill-equipped to address the wide range of risks they’re exposed to. Whether company is a manufacturer of raw materials, finished goods or a supplier of services, … More
After signing a contract, both parties have to protect their own business and value case while they work to achieve a common objective, contractual milestones and specific deliverables. No matter how sound a contract is, what matters in real life is relationship management. Consider the following Top 5 golden rules to avoid pitfalls and create a successful relationship with your service providers … in real life. 1. Success comes from collaboration. Mirror your project model with the service provider’s organization … More
Welcome back! Just tuned in? Click here to read Part 1. Today, I’m going to discuss additional areas where IaaS can reduce costs over the long term. Reduce labor costs and greater availability of resources. By moving toward de-facto open industry IaaS stacks, organization will have an easier time obtaining lower cost resources to build and support their applications and workloads. Training and on-boarding employee costs will decrease, while choices around third parties to support the workloads will increase. With … More
The promise of IaaS savings can be elusive and not readily apparent. In fact, some ISG customers question if they will really achieve any cost savings, or if adopting IaaS will be, ‘Another technology and, another vendor to support, thus driving up costs.’ In our view, those willing to invest the proper management commitment and oversight will reap cost savings over the long term. It’s all about discipline, convergence and standardization. To begin this two part series, here’s a look … More
Benchmarking business and IT operations is a tried-and-true method of ensuring that internal and/or external service providers are performing efficiently in terms of costs and service quality. A good benchmark shows how an organization is doing relative to industry peers and market standards, identifies improvement opportunities and provides a stake in the ground from which to plan and implement a transformational change strategy. But a good benchmark doesn’t happen by itself. As a client, you have to conduct due diligence … More
Large companies must maximize the value of their applications environment to compete in today’s business environment. Because Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) is so intricately tied to bottom line results, many organizations seek specialized service providers to ensure best-in-class capabilities. While transitioning to an ADM outsourcing contract requires the staffing and onboarding of a significant set of new skills under a tight time frame, successful staffing remains important long after the end of transition. If not managed properly, this process … More
A significant part of an insurance company’s operations consists of back office processes that have been brought together through the acquisition of legacy books of business, differing client needs and an evolving regulatory environment. About 80% of insurers’ back office processes are similar to each other. The remaining 20% vary widely and can be very specific to the operation of a particular insurance company. The lack of a common operating model undoubtedly hinders companies from lowering the cost of operations … More
Until recently, governments at all levels have found the market for budgeting tools to be woefully inadequate. Accordingly, most governmental organizations continue to use cobbled-together, Frankenstein-like budgeting tools that, more often than not, rely on users to extract or re-enter data in offline spreadsheets to analyze budgetary policy proposals. Such tools are labor-intensive, inflexible, error prone, limited by the data collected and fail to provide timely, sufficient budgetary insight to optimize resource allocation. In this time of greater public budget … More
By Ronald Paschen, Partner, ISG Today’s information technology (IT) organizations face a dilemma. On the one hand, the digital economy is accelerating the pace of change in IT. The adoption of emerging technologies, the development of new business models and the consumerization of IT require that it evolve rapidly. On the other hand, IT faces a constant cost pressure and an increasing commoditization of services, which enable new sourcing approaches. In either case, incremental improvements and minor upgrades are not … More
Do you have persistent challenges aligning business and IT strategy? Do projects get bogged down in constant consensus-building and lose momentum? Do decisions continually get unnecessarily elevated to higher executive levels, slowing time-to-market? Many companies have well-established governance mechanisms for finance and other corporate functions, but these same companies often have immature IT governance mechanisms despite significant IT assets, capital investments and operating budgets. Immature governance can lead to misaligned priorities, inefficient use of scarce human and investment capital, and … More
Now that you’ve signed the contract, is your organization experiencing higher than anticipated end-user computing (EUC) and device growth? How is your service provider reacting to your demand? Have you been surprised by a different charging model to manage the growth? Are the business case benefits beginning to erode? If you answer yes to any of these questions, the following Top 5 ideas will help you get your EUC under control. 1. Work with your service provider to leverage your … More
The sourcing environment has become intensely complex with every type of operational service potentially being outsourced, shared sourced, or retained and squeezed in every direction to increase productivity and profit line contribution. And all of this is complicated by multiple providers who must somehow work effectively together. Managing business requirements (demand) and service providers (supply) in an integrated fashion is one of the greatest management challenges facing today’s executives. Three common failings can easily trip up service integration: the lack … More
The renewal of a major second generation outsourcing contract presents an interesting dilemma. Changing service providers, especially one that manages a large part of your operations, is never easy, even in the best of circumstances. The incumbency factor, shrinkage in your retained organization, the limited internal capability depth and the need to devote management bandwidth to a huge transition, all while keeping the lights on, would give pause to most organizations. If your incumbent has at least earned a “first … More
