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Yes, we said that. Benchmarking your outsourced contract is a waste of time.
Here’s why. Thirty years ago most corporations ran their own IT systems. The benchmarking methodologies developed by the specialist companies at these times, (such as Compass and Gartner) were designed to do root cause analysis and then take corrective actions. Corporations developed these benchmarking techniques according to the way IT was delivered and procured in the last millennium.
Here is how the benchmarking companies carried out benchmarks in the 1980s:
- Compare a company with its peer group, typically four to six companies (also known as discreet
Predictive analytics have been used in actuarial services in the insurance industry for many years now. However, given the nature of the insurance business and the market, it is now used in various other functions in the insurance industry – to enhance customer experience and satisfaction, for sales and marketing, to improve operational efficiencies and to reduce costs. In business, predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities.
Insurers gather and store a tremendous amount of data. Information from a variety of sources, including applications for policies, premiums and claims contain vital intelligence… Read the rest
The heavily regulated and IP-driven life sciences industry operates in a state of continual flux. This dynamic nature of the industry throws a diverse mix of powerful challenges and equally promising opportunities at the pharmaceutical executive all the time.
Some of the key challenges facing pharmaceutical companies at the moment are:
- A patent cliff
- Dwindling pipelines and late-stage attritions
- Rising cost of commercialization
- A host of healthcare cost containment measures adopted by regulators and payers across key markets
To offset the revenue loss triggered by major patent expirations, companies have moved towards innovative therapies—often biologics—for niche indications with… Read the rest
The retail sector is a significant contributor to a country’s economy. In 2010, retail consumption accounted for two-thirds of the U.S. gross domestic product at $4.35 trillion. In the UK, retail sales were over £293 billion, according to the British Retail Consortium.
The retail industry has seen upheaval with the global economic crisis and intensely competitive environment, where margins are slimming down and customer loyalty is constantly fluctuating. It is critical for retailers to obtain insights to decide how much and what merchandize to stock, how to operate, and which customers they should fight to retain so that they can… Read the rest
Analytics beyond patterns
All successful Financial Service providers are exploring analytics to manage business. An important aspect of analytics is to use historic patterns to determine future trends. Thus the knowledge of fraud patterns can be used to strengthen fraud management.
Regulations changing risk analytics needs
Maintaining an organization or individual risk score card was once confined to larger organizations. Bureaus filled the gap by offering a unified approach to scoring based on behavioral attributes, which appealed to smaller firms. The evolution of business intelligence and analytical tools has helped smaller organizations adopt analytical insights and risk-grid-based pricing to… Read the rest
It is a Formula One Grand Prix. Crew members are crunching data from the sensors attached to the car. In a single season, a team will burn 200,000 liters of fuel in testing to identify 50 slightly different blends of fuel additives. Subject to predictive and simulated models, the crew should be able to give the right blend of power boosting additives to touch the finish line!
Similarly, your banker, insurer, telecom provider or retail store could be tracking your buying behavior to offer you an optimal product/service mix. With Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and other social media being tracked,… Read the rest
Beans, blueberries, broccoli, green tea and Omega 3-rich fish are all hailed as health super foods. In my book, the competitive commercial sector’s super food is knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). And I’m not talking research here – although research certainly has its value – but analytics, predictive analytics. An increasing number of companies are using it to identify risks and opportunities, determine appropriate price points and ultimately gain a leg up against their competitors.
One highly-publicized predictive analytics initiative was Overstock.com’s May 2011 launch of a competition wherein the team that can improve its recommendation engine by 10 percent or… Read the rest
Today’s harried IT managers and CTOs must support the applications that keep the lights on in the business, find time for IT innovation, AND answer your questions about why you can’t change your password. In many cases, they spend up to 80 percent of the time answering your questions and fixing desk top problems that you inadvertently created because you’re not an IT person and somehow messed it up. (Yep, that would be me.)
Add in Moore’s law and companies discover the desktops they own are almost as outdated as a manual typewriter in just 36 months. Where can they… Read the rest
I remember 2003 and 2004 because that’s when most companies I interviewed about outsourcing arrangements started talking in earnest about “taking a partnering approach” to get more value from outsourcing. Since 2006, many have talked about their successes in partnering. But here’s the reality; they were only partial successes.
Partnering helped them get through the transition phase easier and helped them try to resolve challenges in a win-win manner; but when the business situation changed and thus impacted the buyer’s savings or the service provider’s margins, most of them still hit a wall despite the partnering approach.
There were foundational
Almost as fast as a wink – that’s how quickly word spreads on Twitter. And everyone’s doing it – you’d have to have been under a rock, so to speak, not to know of the tweets covering the Royal Wedding (2.7 million social media mentions) and of the even bigger stats on tweets about the death of Osama bin Laden.
But did you know that there’s a hedge fund now using tweets to predict market movement? Research by two universities says the emotions expressed about companies tracked through tweets will predict market movements up… Read the rest
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