If you’ve been the customer in an outsourcing relationship, you encountered the dilemma of whether or not to build penalties into the service level agreement. If you haven’t outsourced yet, a quick Google search will toss up dozens of articles about the carrot-and-stick controversy: whether to use penalties or rewards, or both, in SLAs.
A hefty reward or a hefty penalty should get a service provider’s attention and be an incentive that drives performance at the level the customer designates. So why does this strategy work only in theory sometimes?
A high level of fees at risk can be a… Read the rest
There’s a growing recognition that an outsourcing initiative is a journey. Executives of some of the world’s leading companies have said that to me when I interviewed them about the successes and challenges in their outsourcing arrangements.
A question I’ve asked when interviewing literally hundreds of outsourcing execs is what they would do differently the second time around if they had an opportunity to start over (from the initial negotiation phase).
It’s hard to believe, but a few (very few) say they wouldn’t do anything differently and that everything went smoothly and according to plan. Many reply that they actually… Read the rest
Two words: cloud and SaaS. They’re a common thread in discussions for outsourcing plans these days because the advantages these technology-access models present to buyers are truly significant. Both are increasingly marketed as outsourced services. But are they really outsourcing? If so, are these models causing companies to overlook crucial aspects of outsourcing arrangements? Or is outsourcing morphing to simply “sourcing” – commoditized services that really don’t involve a relationship factor, governance frameworks, and other complexities?
In other words, is the notion of what constitutes “outsourcing” changing? To find the answer to this question, I invited four experts to a… Read the rest
I just read an article published this week, titled “Spreading the word on outsourcing.” What’s interesting about it is that, although it starts out advising companies about the benefits of outsourcing their non-core processes, it switches to a discussion about outsourcing failures. The writer cites a recent study that found nearly 70 percent of 300 survey respondents (apparently in Ireland) said their outsourcing deals “suffered from poor vendor selection and lack of service levels.”
What grabbed my attention even more was a letter from a New Albany, Indiana, resident commenting on the poor quality of services, the subsequent… Read the rest
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