Industry news

HCL Technologies Ltd., a leading global IT services provider, has underlined its position as a socially responsible business by announcing a series of initiatives around building Glocal Centres of Excellence (GCoE) with the aim of creating 10,000 jobs in US and Europe in the next five years.

"As our unique Employees First culture has continued to grow and evolve, we've seen more and more HCL employees expressing the desire to see a truly socially responsible business model," said Vineet Nayar, Vice Chairman & CEO, HCL Technologies. "Clearly, the need of the hour is growth and employment and we believe that this initiative will create unique business value for HCL while generating sustainable employment in local economies for years to come. It will need significant collaboration of all stakeholders; however, we do believe that it can be done and we are committed to backing this program with all our resources and best intent," he added.

The public administration select committee has commended the government on making progress to tackle the well known problems associated with public sector IT, but warns it has not done enough to address concerns around skills, legacy equipment and allegations of "cartel-like" behaviour among suppliers.

The committee published a report in July 2011 entitled, A recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach, that listed its concerns about the public sector's overdependance on the same large IT providers, lack of ability to make any large-scale change to how it uses IT, and issues around skills and legacy equipment.

The committee has now published a progress report examining how far the issues raised by the original report have been addressed.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, has unveiled Desk.com, revolutionizing customer service for a social and mobile world.

Desk.com enables businesses to deliver personal customer service by offering a help desk that is social, mobile and simple to use and deploy. Desk.com allows any business to instantly work with customers over any major social network. Desk.com Mobile allows companies to carry a help desk in their pocket and answer customers on the go.

"We built Desk.com so that every company can deliver personal customer service in a social and mobile world. Desk.com is social at its core; its mobile app instantly lets any employee, anywhere, deliver awesome customer service; and it can be deployed quickly and easily," said Alex Bard, vice president and general manager, Desk.com.

The European Commission is to establish the European Cloud Partnership, which aims to bring together public sector organisations and the IT industry to work on commons requirements for cloud procurement, said Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the EC with responsibility for Europe's digital agenda.

Speaking at the European Cloud Partnership World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Kroes promised that the commission would invest an initial €10m in the partnership. It will be set up in 2012 and its first results are expected the following year.

buyingTeam, Europe’s leading provider of end-to-end procurement services, announces that it is to transition to a new brand and, from 20 February 2012, will be known as Proxima.

The move reflects the scope and range of services that the company now offers its portfolio of blue-chip, multi-national clients, driven by the growing importance that businesses place on procurement as a strategic corporate function in today’s challenging economic environment.

2012 also sees Proxima expanding its offering into the North American market. With some large outsourcing assignments already underway in the United States, Proxima has a platform from which to grow its presence in the market and translate its track record of delivery for clients on both sides of the Atlantic.

Matthew Eatough, CEO, Proxima, said: “Over the years we have evolved along with our clients to reach this market leading position and gain their trust as an advisor. Changing our name to Proxima reflects that progress and our ambitions for the future. Our growing portfolio of highly-respected clients is testament to the skills and experience of our people."

Worried over the adverse fallout of protectionism, Indian finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday said if the US stops outsourcing jobs to India, profitability of both the economies will be hurt.

Mukherjee said: "If the US stops outsourcing jobs from India to some extent profitability of the economies will be affected."

The FTSE 100 security group G4S is set to replace its roster of corporate advisers and brokers this week as punishment for not buying the Danish cleaner ISS.

The chairman, Alf Duch-Pederson,has announced that he is to quit after the £5.2bn proposal, which would have made G4S the world's biggest cleaning and security group with 1.2 million employees, failed to get shareholder support in November. However, the G4S board believes that it can only regain credibility by also axing some of the advisers on that deal.

The Technology Strategy Board has announced that it will establish a Catapult centre for the connected UK digital economy.

The new Catapult is a technology and innovation centre which will accelerate innovation and stimulate growth in this important area of the economy. It will bring together technological expertise to help the UK’s world-leading digital businesses to develop, test and apply new technologies, reducing the risk associated with creating hugely profitable products and services in the future. The centre may focus on areas such as:

- How digital media and content are traded and used - in order to find sustainable ways to help businesses co-operate to create profitable services;

- The pervasiveness of digital services - addressing the impact of new technologies and systems such as cloud computing and identity management, as businesses and industries become more digital;

- The blending of digital and physical worlds - looking at how our devices, clothes, cars and other consumer goods become better connected to enhance our physical lives.

800 job cuts were yesterday as outsourcing giant Serco consolidated functions following a series of acquisitions and administrators of Thamesteel cut most of its workforce.

Serco, which delivers back-office support for a range of industries including banking, insurance, travel and healthcare, is merging its business processing operations into a single global division.

The move will be combined with an overhaul of its UK management structure.

In 1979 Joe Strummer sang about being lost in the supermarket of life. Today’s CIOs and IT procurement teams face similar challenges.

IT expenditure and value for money are coming under increasing levels of scrutiny. Unlike the heyday of the 1980’s, people do sometimes get sacked for making what appeared the safe and obvious choice.

The sourcing of external IT services is now a complex and potentially risky activity. I’d like to shed some light on the ever-changing world of IT sourcing strategies.

Continuing with the supermarket analogy, the choices appear somewhat aligned. CIOs can adopt the following strategies:

• The home delivery: take a traditional one-size-fits all approach to outsourcing, engage with a global outsourcer, taking the good with the bad for the sake of convenience

• The low-cost international supermarket: engage with a pure offshore provider who delivers volume, commoditised, services at lower cost

• The local supermarket: select your mix of branded and own-brand products satisfying the majority of your requirements, whilst also retaining the option of shopping elsewhere

• The corner shop: niche single-product providers where you need to pay for additional shoe leather to manage multiple providers in parallel.

I can’t claim this supermarket analogy as my own. About a year ago, we were delivering a managed service for a number of client Microsoft databases, and the client contacted us to ask if we would also be able to manage their Oracle ERP solution as well. The client had previously received their ERP services from a larger, more commoditised, provider and felt that the flexibility offered by a more ‘local supermarket’ approach better suited their needs. By delivering these seemingly disparate services within a standard service engagement framework, the client gained trust and confidence in the services delivered before committing further.

This selective outsourcing approach is becoming more common in today’s battle to balance cost against quality. CIOs and IT procurement teams are continually being challenged to show a tangible return on investment in the form of true business value from their external sourcing activities. Selective outsourcing means a move away from the all-or-nothing perception people have of outsourcing IT services. It allows you to keep key technology people in your business as the bridge between the technology and the business, whilst simultaneously providing commodity services or those that are too niche - or expensive to find and retain - under a framework that works.

Selective outsourcing also provides the ability for a CIO to blend internal skills that are key differentiators to their business with these ‘selected’ outsourced skills. There’s a common misconception that outsourcing means giving it all to someone else to run – who doesn’t understand what the business is trying to do, which is why many CIO’s shy away from it. Thanks to selective outsourcing, this is no longer an all-or –nothing choice.

What type of store are you looking for?

All too often the I.T. selection process by-passes the first step which is to ask: what type of provider do I want?

Take for example, an ERP solution. Many buyers would look for a provider who specialises in that particular ERP platform – the corner shop analogy. Surely they are the best people to manage that solution? But what happens when you end up with a multitude of specific providers all interfacing with each other through the IT fabric of your business? As the client, your energies are expended on managing this multi-sourced arrangement, and the entire business-case for external sourcing becomes more questionable. Without a robust Supplier Management function, and flexible yet clear contracts to underpin it, this approach can very quickly become a tangled-web of unclear responsibilities and conflicting supplier commitments.

At the other end of the scale, the buyer may elect to use their Home Delivery Company (maybe in the form of their outsourced infrastructure provider perhaps) to provide the ERP support? This gives them a single supplier to manage doesn’t it? Well, maybe not. The service providers are also under the same pressures as the IT department to maintain that cost vs. quality equilibrium and, unless it is one of their core service offerings, they will be: (a) taking a risk with your core business application by overextending their capabilities or; (b) sub-contracting the services to a niche provider. Either way, your business is more exposed than you might think.

And the low-cost international supermarket choice of global offshoring? This works extremely well when your Supplier Management team is a mature, established function with experience of working with such organisations. With the ever-changing global economic climate are you prepared – and contractually permitted – to move those services to lower cost markets when the supply moves elsewhere?

In part 2 of this article, I’ll discuss how to choose a selective sourcing shortlist and some of the key considerations before making a selection.