The New Professional Services Maturity Model - A Roadmap To Achieving Professional Services Excellence
30 Mar 2008 | Print
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Effective pricing and discounting strategies are one of the key reasons why some technology professional service organizations succeed and others fail. According to the “The New Professional Service Maturity Model” benchmark report just completed by Adexta and SPI Research, companies with the lowest bill rates experienced twice the project cancellation rate (3.2%) compared to companies with the highest bill rates (1.6%). The results for on-time project completion were equally dramatic with only 67% of low bill rate projects delivered on time as compared to 85% for companies with the highest bill rates.
Unlike a BPO where you need to “sweat the assets” a smart KPO needs to work at both. This is what will drive sustainability, client advantage, people empowerment and make the KPO industry really a force to reckon with…
ITIL v3’s business service management approach makes it the best fit for adoption by private equity (PE) firm for deploying in their portfolio companies in order to enhance the value of their portfolio.
The commanders of India’s software service companies came together in the financial capital ‘Mumbai’ last week to celebrate, and take stock of what lies ahead. The industry is already under a cloud because of fears of strengthening rupee and the possibility of a U.S. recession.
Over the course of the last couple of years leading law firms have begun to wake up to the reality that we live and operate in a global marketplace. Technology enables an increasing array of legal support services and higher value legal work to be outsourced offshore. The legal profession is now starting to take advantage of the labor arbitrage that has been exploited by other industries for well over a decade. Throughout 2006 and 2007 the offshore legal outsourcing market also witnessed the entry of some of the world’s largest Business Process Outsourcing (BPOs) companies together with a significant level of venture capital and private equity funding.
SaaS (Software as a Service) or On-Demand application delivery as a disruptive delivery model is challenging traditional Enterprise applications. Adoption rate is the fastest in the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) space. But, large multinational organizations are slow to embrace the on-demand delivery model.
Mike Vizard, Editorial Director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise makes a poignant remark about the importance of diversity in the IT department in his blog “Diversity in IT Has Become a Business Imperative”. I agree with his view that “the great issue of the day in technology is not the technology but rather the people within the IT department itself”. His observation “Indians and Russians seem to prefer to work with their own. Caucasian employees form their own cliques based on age, gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity while Asians do likewise along national and sometimes even tribal lines. And, in response, Afro-Americans have now also created their own cliques”, and “The onus on preventing that from happening should fall squarely on the shoulders of IT managers who unfortunately appear to be unwilling for any number of reasons to tackle the issue head on” has some truth to it.
Fractal is a leading provider of advanced analytics services with more than 40 clients in 15 countries. The company helps retail financial; banking and telecommunication institutions take data based decisions that enhance the effectiveness of their marketing and risk management programs. Every year Fractal builds over 200 customer behavior models that get implemented at businesses across the world. Fractal works with 5 out of the 10 largest banks in Asia and with 3 of the largest Credit card issuers in India and has a global presence with offices in New York, Singapore and Mumbai and a client presence in USA, Japan, Singapore, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
For Indian outsourcing providers, their business is evolving towards securing partnerships for innovation with their customers. It is therefore no longer only about cost-savings and taking on non-core activities. Now here is a challenge for them: How to go about obtaining enough specific internal knowledge from their customers in order to produce relevant value-adding innovation?
One of the challenges facing India for last mile connectivity to homes and offices is the stranglehold that the government owned telcos (
Why Consider Outsourcing?
For those who have seen the raise of the rupee against the greenback a last couple of quarters, the question mark stays - “Will it continue to raise or will it reverse back to the Rs. 45 to 1 USD levels ?”
The newspapers are all a gaga about India, being the “World’s Back Office” or the “World’s Engineers”. OK, that’s pretty cool - but who are the World’s architects ? . India is executing, but who is doing the thinking?
Let us try to demystify the Service Oriented Architectures.
After their successes with outsourcing services, Indian IT Services firms are growing their consulting business. In Europe, and in particular mainland western countries like Germany and France, one of their key challenges is to convince European executives that they have acquired internally enough “local” culture to provide adapted services. This is only a matter of time and the first Indian firms to achieve this will build a strong competitive advantage.
In my view, the offshore business has reached a point where it has a “value add” problem. By that I mean, there is a problem that adequate value is not being added. And in many ways, this is a result of the success of the industry.
Human Resources Outsourcing (HRO) is a multi-billion dollar industry with HRO Europe is growing at a CAGR of 28% while the HRO US is growing at a CAGR of 16%. After a decade long industry, there is a phenomenal change in the outsourcing of HR processes. During the initials years, Companies outsource only those traditional HR processes such as Payroll administration, benefits administration. Adding to this, HRO was only considered as a ‘cost-saving” vehicle by the companies ignoring the other major advantages of HRO.
In the corporate world of today, we are all very often engaged in speaking to a small or mid sized set of people to exchange ideas or convince or “sell” something to them. Be it a product, a service, a practice or method of working,an idea, motivation to take up a task, a training program or even our own skills and personalities, we are always “selling something to the crowd” At work the group itself may be comprised of customers, suppliers, peers, or junior or senior colleagues.
Effective pricing and discounting strategies are one of the key reasons why some technology professional service organizations succeed and others fail. According to the “The New Professional Service Maturity Model” benchmark report just completed by Adexta and SPI Research,
Unlike a BPO where you need to “sweat the assets” a smart KPO needs to work at both. This is what will drive sustainability, client advantage, people empowerment and make the KPO industry really a force to reckon with…
ITIL v3’s business service management approach makes it the best fit for adoption by private equity (PE) firm for deploying in their portfolio companies in order to enhance the value of their portfolio.
The commanders of India’s software service companies came together in the financial capital ‘Mumbai’ last week to celebrate, and take stock of what lies ahead. The industry is already under a cloud because of fears of strengthening rupee and the possibility of a U.S. recession.
Over the course of the last couple of years leading law firms have begun to wake up to the reality that we live and operate in a global marketplace. Technology enables an increasing array of legal support services and higher value legal work to be outsourced offshore. The legal profession is now starting to take advantage of the labor arbitrage that has been exploited by other industries for well over a decade.
SaaS (Software as a Service) or On-Demand application delivery as a disruptive delivery model is challenging traditional Enterprise applications. Adoption rate is the fastest in the SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) space. But, large multinational organizations are slow to embrace the on-demand delivery model.
Mike Vizard, Editorial Director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise makes a poignant remark about the importance of diversity in the IT department in his blog “Diversity in IT Has Become a Business Imperative”. I agree with his view that “the great issue of the day in technology is not the technology but rather the people within the IT department itself”.
Fractal is a leading provider of advanced analytics services with more than 40 clients in 15 countries. The company helps retail financial; banking and telecommunication institutions take data based decisions that enhance the effectiveness of their marketing and risk management programs.
What next in offshoring? Different folks will give different responses - Analytics, KPO, CRO, Moving up value chain, Product Development, Engineering Services, Consulting, Higher domain knowledge, Channel Development etc . This is like few blind men trying to describe an elephant. All are probably right in their own way but all are missing the big picture. This big picture in my opinion is offshoring for growth and innovation…
C Mahalingam (Mali) has more than 23 years of experience in the field of Human Resources and has held senior executive positions with leading organizations. Prior to joining Symphony Services, Mali led HR for the India operations of IBM and Hewlett-Packard as well as Philips Software Center.
vCustomer Corporation is a leading provider of cost-effective customer care solutions. We leverage the right blend of innovative technology, business analytics and industry expertise to consistently deliver customized, high quality, cost-saving contact center services.![Strategy 5[1]](http://thinkingstreet.com/business/wp-content/uploads/strategy_5[1].jpg)
Sandeep Kaujalgi
