Basman | Explore: IT Outsourcing

Luis Folch Rodriguez of Dresdner Bank AG in Frankfurt, Germany, asked me per mail a couple of days ago, why I’m talking here so much about sourcing projects in large international companies. What about the small and medium businesses (SMB)?. Good point. Take into account that in Germany talking about SMB’s we are talking roughly of enterprizes in the range of small sized business with 100-1,000 clients (PC’s, workstations) and medium sized with 1,000-8,000 clients maybe. This is of course dependent from your specific point of view.

First of all, outsourcing is a mass and commodity business in my opinion which operates with narrow margines. This means you have to generate a lot of business to make your money. Since aquisition, contracting and transition of work is the most expensive, unforeseeable and most risky part of this business, the large service providers tend to target large international potential customers. The strategy behind this is, the chances you can generate high revenue stream of one single contract is higher than with a single contract with a SMB. So large providers are concentrating themselves on large customers. And really professionally none on SMB.

In return large customers tend to demand for high-customized services. They want to get rid of the responsibility of their (legacy) systems and people. This is OK if one single customer can generate the needed critical mass in business.

But this won’t obsiously work for the typical SMB market. This attitude simply won’t pay off. It would be way to expensive and the revenue stream would be insufficiant per contract. The strategy: You have to generate the critical mass via generating a mass market for SMB. Let’s have a look. How do we specifically focus and master the SMB market:

1. by perfect tuning on the needs of the goal market (by size and/or industry)
2. by consistent standardisation of our service products and technologies
3. by merciless streamlining, rationalization and automation of our seemless service and support processes (consolidated central system monitoring & management and customer care services)
4. by an intelligent and complete logistics chain for material, spare parts and consumption goods
5. by an extremely fine-grained and exact controlling of finances and quality
6. by a well-balanced globalization of sourcing
7. by a world-wide expansion of the business model
8. by a perfectly trained staff and personnel
9. by intelligent instrumentalization of web-based applications
10. by additionally creating new marketing and sales channels for this concept

Each single item in this list can in return be outsourced to diverse highly specialized subcontractors, too. At this moment there is not one single (global) service provider capable of this. This would be quite a challenge. You need a new type of IT service provider for this. The business modell would be a sort of McDonalds for the IT industry.

The existing IT service providers are far from beeing effective or efficient. Not even for large customers.

This is something I would be really very interested in. Any inquiries? Let’s work this out!

Enhancing operational ITSM - The new ITIL aims to ease day-to-day service management.

As the IT organization becomes an increasingly critical link in the business value chain, a highly effective IT Service Management implementation becomes increasingly essential. Based on the comprehensive set of management best practices spelled out in the internationally accepted IT Infrastructure Library, ITSM can be instrumental in optimizing service quality, improving service levels, reducing service delivery costs and maximizing the business value of IT.

ITSM has a particularly vital role to play in the operational arena, which encompasses all the activities involved in IT service delivery and service quality monitoring, management and measurement. In fact, it has become clear that if your organization has not yet moved to implement ITSM best practices relevant to everyday service management operations, you’re likely to be at a distinct disadvantage as you confront key questions facing virtually every IT organization:

• Are you equipped to consistently meet your service-level agreements?
• Are processes in place to ensure continuous business-IT alignment?
• Does the business agree that your organization is delivering significant value?
• How do you cost-justify needed IT investments?
• How can you spend less on routine IT service maintenance — and use the  savings for IT service innovation?

Which service-related investments are likely to bring the highest payback?
Addressing these key questions, operational ITSM helps IT organizations align with the business and become more agile and adaptable to dynamic market conditions. But customer needs and priorities change. New governance models emerge. Technology advances. New standards are issued. New regulations are promulgated.

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Getronics introduced its innovative, modular Future-Ready Workspace solution developed specifically to empower people to work more productively.  The Future-Ready Workspace is the result of Getronics’ more than thirty years’ of experience in delivering quality solutions in workspace and applications services for many of the global Fortune 500 companies.

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Workday, Inc., founded in March 2005 by Dave Duffield and a recognized team of ERP veterans, makes its debut today, introducing Workday Enterprise Business Services™, the first in a new generation of on-demand ERP solutions, and the general availability of its first suite, Workday Human Capital Management™.  Taking a fresh, modern approach, the company aims to provide mid- to large-sized companies with a compelling alternative to traditional enterprise software. The launch, to be held in a webcast today at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, also includes an announcement of the company’s initial customers and business partners.

Duffield has a successful track record of building companies and creating new markets for business software. He founded PeopleSoft, Inc., which became known as the popular leader in its category in the 1990s, as well as three other successful business software companies. He co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri, a long-time colleague and executive at PeopleSoft.

“The combination of today’s dynamic business environment and major technology advancements has offered us a great opportunity to create a new breed of ERP—one that is not beholden to aging technologies and business models,” said Dave Duffield, CEO and co-founder.  “In addition to the initial availability of Workday Human Capital Management, we are pleased to be announcing our first two production customers and an important set of strategic partnerships.”

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Oftentimes, discussions around SOA focus more on technical and development issues. This first in a series of Consultants’ Roundtable podcasts delves into the business value of SOA.

Selling SOA economics inside of enterprises today is as important as executing on SOA deployments. Both business leaders and IT leaders are learning how to begin the short- and long-term cost benefit analysis for SOA. It’s complicated—and it varies from company to company.

To learn more, Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst for Interarbor Solutions and host of his own Briefings Direct podcast series, brings together two HP Services executives in a high-level discussion on how to make the business case for SOA.

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I’m scanning twiceaday - early in the morning and late in the evening - all press releases and news of about 60 corporate sites. Most of the time I have to do this work manually  because these sites are organized awfully. I ask you sincerely, dear press officers of the multinational mega corporations, how is it possible (and why is it necessary in your opinion) to deliver press releases in PDF format? Or to hide them deep in your sites where I have to click 5-6 times to reach them?

Recently Todd Zeigler made a discussion roundup of ways to improve newspaper websites. Mostly all of what he recaps in his list is true for press releases, too! Sometimes I believe press officers have never heard of the internet or any digital revolution yet … Everybody who releases a message to the press today in a PDF format should be divided in to four parts after being tarred and feathered!

Here is a urgent and important todo list for press officers (inspired by Todd):

1. Get rid of all registration
2. Provide full text RSS feeds (suitable for feed readers and news aggregators)
3. Start using tags
4. Use links in your text to relevant content
5. Implement a news ticker on your frontpage
6. Work with external “social” websites (like weblogs etc)
7. Offer alternative views of your content
8. Modernize your site’s graphic design
9. Learn from Craigslist
10. Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs
11. Allow readers to comment on every story
12. Improve search features
13. Use better and cleaner HTML (suite of evaluation tools here)
14. Open up your archives
15. Provide multilingual Versions
16. Offer supplemental content
17. Open up the letter to the editor process

Do your homework! Hey, we are already in the Third Millennium!

[Hat tip for Heiko Hebig for the link to Todd's post]

Oftentimes, discussions around Service-oriented architecture (SOA) focus more on technical and development issues. This first in a HP series of Consultants’ Roundtable podcasts delves into the business value of SOA.

Selling SOA economics inside of enterprises today is as important as executing on SOA deployments. Both business leaders and IT leaders are learning how to begin the short- and long-term cost benefit analysis for SOA. It’s complicated—and it varies from company to company.

To learn more, Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst for Interarbor Solutions and host of his own Briefings Direct podcast series, brings together two HP Services executives in a high-level discussion on how to make the business case for SOA.

Terri Bennett Schoenrock, executive director of SOA services and J2EE open source programs, and Andrew Pugsley, worldwide lead for SOA service development, join Gardner in examining the pay-offs and opportunities that can result from making the move to SOA, as well as ramping-up with HP’s SOA assessment process. Plus, several user case studies demonstrate how to measure success.

Download or listen to the podcast (30:40 mins | 14.9MB)
Read the transcript

Reference: The website of the Open Service Oriented Architecture (OSOA) collaboration

Common Goal to Provide Standard for Describing System Information in XML Format

BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun today announced they have published a draft of a new specification that defines a consistent way to express how computer networks, applications, servers and other IT resources are described — or modeled - in extensible markup language (XML) so businesses can more easily manage the services which are built on these resources.

As a result of joint collaboration, the open, industry-wide specification defines a common language for expressing information about IT resources and services. Called the Service Modeling Language (SML), the specification enables a hierarchy of IT resource models to be created from reusable building blocks, rather than requiring custom descriptions of every service - reducing costs and system complexity for customers. The group plans to submit the draft specification to an industry standards organization later this year.

SML addresses a growing industry need as a result of the numerous ways to represent the same IT resource. Besides being inefficient, the use of different formats leads to two problems. First, because the tools and management applications use different formats, they don’t speak the same language. Therefore, the information must be translated, which can lead to technical details being lost or misinterpreted. Second, the use of different formats may require IT architects to use written descriptions or sketches to convey information about resources. Such descriptions must then be translated into a form that tools and management applications can consume, which is a manual, error-prone process.

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