Expectations of service providers should shift

[#1]

Back in the last decade, there was a great deal of activity around workflow and information flow automation techniques within the business. Although it is clear that those approaches have been applied within the IT organization with the instantiation of cloud computing causing a shift expectations within IT. The focus on the rest of the business seems to have waned within the business itself.

With “Big Data” we see a new focus on time-to-insight, but I think it is time to harvest the experiences learned from cloud and instead focus on time-to-action. This is an area I’ve had thoughts about almost since my first posts on this blog. Now is the time to redefine how value is generated in a truly disruptive fashion, similar to the way that cloud computing has disrupted many organizations thoughts about the consumption of IT resources.

Last week Phil Fersht put out a blog posts titled: The end of Outsourcing as we know it.

He starts off my saying: “it’s not all about outsourcing and it’s not all about shared services; it’s about focusing on how to globalize processes, how to transform finance (and other) functions, and how to govern it all in a global business services context.”

And describing the shift in expectations between the buyer and the service provider. It is clear to me that some of the foundational process will need to change, as well as the systems that support those processes. That only makes sense after all, these information based processes were all designed with a scarcity model rather than the abundance model we live in today.

One issue will be the skills required and how they are applied will need to change (for both the buyer and the seller) – and the mental shift could get uncomfortable for all

[#2]

CIO Mag. 5 outsourcing trends to watch