Five Keys to Getting the Most from Your IT Outsourcing Deals
February 10th, 2010Renewing an outsourcing contract provides businesses with an opportunity to revive existing deals and transform the quality of their IT services.
The key to businesses getting what they want when renewing their contract lies in good preparation for negotiations with their supplier, according to outsourcing advisory firm TPI. Debora Card, associate partner at TPI, said it is vital for organisations to fully research what alternative suppliers have to offer before starting negotiations to renew an existing deal.
She said: “Effective contract negotiations leverage comes from developing viable alternatives that are financially, technically and tactically feasible.”
Here is a summary of Card’s tips on how to get a good deal when renewing an outsourcing contract.
Start early
Businesses should start planning for contract negotiations with their existing outsourcing supplier more than a year before the deal is due to expire.
This will leave enough time to pass the service to another supplier or to bring …
Culture, Conflict and Where Value Fits In
December 1st, 2009
By Danny Ertel, Co-Founder and Joe Bubman, Consultant, Vantage Partners
Complex outsourcing relationships are always difficult to manage, but the unique characteristics of offshore deals complicate the challenge. Some early concerns about offshoring, such as political uncertainty and tax issues, appear to have become more manageable with experience. Others remain, however, with one rising above the rest, according to hundreds of participants in Vantage Partners’ “Managing Offshoring Relationships: Governance in Global Deals” study: culture. And the way customers and service providers manage culture has a direct impact on the value they achieve in their deal.
What do we mean by culture?
Companies nearly always encounter different organizational cultures when entering into strategic relationships with external partners. After all, companies have different strategies, structures, risk positions, capabilities, and norms, and when the deal is more than a simple buy-sell transaction, those …
Q/A: A New Group Fights for Transparency of Offshored Market Research
November 30th, 2009The global services outsourcing industry may have a lot of things going for it, but in most cases the industry as a whole is not winning any awards for transparency. It is the view of Tom Anderson, who recently founded the Foundation for Transparency in Offshoring, that clients or buyers have a right to know where their business process (and more importantly IP) is being handled. 
His group is particularly focused on the practice of offshoring market research.
We asked Tom recently about the reason he founded FTO and why transparency is such a big deal.
Why did you launch FTO?
The Economic Reality of Offshoring: It’s a Win-Win
October 28th, 2009Offshoring—the wholesale shifting of corporate functions and jobs (particularly those of back-office workers in it and accounting-type roles) to overseas territories—is what gave outsourcing a bad name. It is important, however, to note a crucial distinction between the two:
• Outsourcing need not necessarily result in job losses in a particular territory or country. A job can simply be handed over to another organisation of the same nationality and geographical location where (the company handing it over hopes) it can be carried out more efficiently. Sometimes that other organisation may be in another country, but more often than not it is not.
• Offshoring, however, does involve shifting jobs to another country, but it may not involve transferring jobs to another organisation. For example, a company may simply decide to move its local customer services operation to one of its own subsidiaries abroad. That is offshoring, but it is …
