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Jane Williams, Head of Talent Management and Learning at Siemens IT Solutions and Services discusses the opening up of opportunities and career progression for individuals part of IT or business process outsourcing agreements.

The business of managing and motivating talent in any organisation is an important element to get the best out of individuals and gain a high performance culture. Within the outsourcing arena, many thousands of employees can transfer into an organisation upon signature of a contract. This influx presents challenges of retention, development and motivation of the individual at a time of much change, yet at the same time it is essential to gain employee commitment and engagement for the good of the new contractual relationship.

A focus on people management as a core element of the new outsourcing agreement is crucial to hit the ground running. Professional outsourcing suppliers offer dedicated HR and talent management teams to support effective people transfer and cultural integration of new transferring employees. This is far more than a focus on pay and benefits, but a dedicated approach to knowledge development and career progression through training and development initiatives and more personally tailored coaching and mentoring schemes.

Retaining the people at the heart of organisations

The spectrum of people transferring over to an outsourcing supplier from an originating organisation such as broadcaster, bank or local council can range from back office administration roles through to high level management positions. Each person has an individual need that has to be supported and enhanced. Siemens IT Solutions and Services boasts a ‘practice what it preaches’ philosophy and is proud that 55% of its employees have TUPE transferred from another organisation. Indeed the Managing Director himself was formally part of TUPE transfer.

Encouraging the sharing of knowledge and experience between peers

Where outsourcing agreements see large numbers of people transferring over to an outsourcing supplier but remain on an original site, for example a call or data centre, the challenge of talent management is further exaggerated. Geographical spread and cultures are diverse so positive and mobile talent management initiatives need to be proactively rolled out. This includes internal communication programmes, seminar session, team briefs and social events.

The moment people transfer into Siemens, they are part of a much large community of local, national and sometimes global peers across diverse industry sectors. The alignment of transferring employees to skills practices boosts the sharing of best practice, championing of knowledge and development of careers. For example, a desktop manager within a finance company has the potential to cross pollinate ideas and experiences with a colleague in a public sector organisation. At the same time, career progression is enhanced with greater opportunities available for upwards or horizontal migration.

A positive example of talent transfer in business process outsourcing

National Savings and Investments (NS&I) and Siemens IT Solutions and Services are an example of partnership between government and the private sector, which has been very successful, demonstrated in a long term contract.

NS&I is one of the most deeply-rooted and historically significant financial institutions in the country. It started life as the Post Office Savings Bank and was originally established to encourage people to save by giving them an absolutely secure, easily accessible home for their money, backed by the credibility of the UK Government. In more recent times its strategic objective has been to provide cost effective funding for the Treasury. It does this by making funds available from the retail market at a lower cost than the Treasury could achieve by borrowing from the wholesale market, resulting in a saving for the UK taxpayer.

Back in the 1990s, NS&I needed to take radical steps to get the business on track, which included finding a partner who could deliver an operational business and drive a change programme efficiently and effectively. This would leave the NS&I management team free to concentrate on its core business, the business of competing in a financial services marketplace.

The entire NS&I operations department was outsourced, with more than 4100 staff joining Siemens under TUPE regulations. Once this transfer had taken place, around 130 staff remained keeping responsibility for executive leadership, strategy, product design and pricing, marketing, relationship and contract management and other core management tasks. The Siemens account director is an integral, permanent member of the NS&I executive management board - this means that conscious efforts are made on both sides to set strategy, develop action plans and resolve issues together, as partners rather than through the normal client/supplier relationship. This shared vision has proved to be the key to long term success.

Since 1999, funds under management at NS&I have increased significantly, employee productivity has improved by over 400% and customer response times were slashed from 11 to three days. A shared partner vision has developed the relationship into much more than an outsourcing deal and the key to success has been attributed to the management of people and a stronger customer focus, all underpinned by technology change.

Talent management as the hinge for operational success

The NS&I case example highlights that with the right processes, new innovations, leadership and management of people, productivity gains are assured. Other operational benefits that can be achieved by looking after your ‘people power’ are improved margins, extended market share and even survival in a competitive environment.

Talent management is certainly not the ‘soft’ side of outsourcing, but should be seen as one of the hinges to operational and individual employee success.

www.siemens.co.uk/it-solutions

Siemens IT Solutions and Services is a proven provider of IT and business process outsourcing services to the public sector. Clients include National Savings & Investments (NS&I) VOSA, the UKBA, the Office for National Statistics and Welsh Assembly Government.

Talent Management

"The best minute you spend is the one you invest in people." Ken Blanchard

Time and time again through surveys, questionnaires and online response forums, the response to what makes a positive outsourcing agreement always results in the same answer. The people.

Organisations are realising that the key to effective business partnerships is very often the individual relationships that exist and the amount of time that is put into managing them.

Every week news stories highlight successful outsourcing partnerships and lessons regarding talent management can be learnt from each of them. 3M extending its IT outsourcing relationship with Cognizant is one of them, along with other manufacturers who have recently renewed or extended their outsourcing deals, such as General Motors with HP, Ford with CSC and Dell with the US Department of Homeland Security this year.

Ferenc Szelenyi, Vice President EMEA Public Sector Services, Dell, said: “To make talent management work, it needs to be comprehensive, throughout an organisation. Therefore, the starting point must be to ensure the organisation has the right technology and processes in place, and in one place. This will mean the HR team, together with the management team, can focus on managing the company's talent, rather than on managing each separate transactional process.”

The NOA Talent Management in Outsourcing seminar was held with the aim of sharing best practice, incorporating views from the industry and highlighting how to gain a competitive edge through human development opportunities.

Yvonne Williams, Representative for Individual Professional Development, NOA, opened the seminar and said: “Development and skills mapping are not always laid out clearly within an organisation and there can often be overlapping or duplication. Understanding where problems can lie in the outsourcing process and devising solutions using the right people for the job is crucial to its success.”

Training and professional development are key in outsourcing. Trained and skilled staff need to be retained and development plans need to be frequently looked at within the context of the bigger picture and changes in the industry. These changes can include the increase in vertical expertise, emphasis on relationship management with offshore and nearshore providers as well as the implementation of evolving technology in the industry.

Logica was on hand at the seminar to present a case study of how professional training can be used to best effect. Logica employs 39,000 people across 26 countries and has developed numerous successful global “You Develop, We Grow” activities focusing on talent management and professional training.

Helen Sussex, UK Skills Development and Training Manager, Logica, said: “Specific people skills are the ones which are mostly missing from outsourcing partnerships. Outsourcing should not be seen as a simple delivery of services. Client management and investment in staff is essential. The benefits of a comprehensive talent and development programmes are numerous. The value based approach is emerging increasingly in outsourcing and suppliers are no longer simply required to fulfil their SLA.”

As the outsourcing industry is maturing, it is important that it is recognised as a profession in its own right. The UK is very often seen as an outsourcing centre of excellence, yet it often fails in promoting its own professionalism.

The NOA is embracing this challenge through qualifications, development workshops, various events and a fellowship. These all aim to further establish the outsourcing sector as a highly regarded profession by promoting the industry and producing white papers which can be distributed to the wider outsourcing community.

The NOA Pathway is a set of accredited qualifications designed to support the development of competency and provide professional recognition in the outsourcing industry. The programmes are flexible to allow the participants to shape the programme around their own agenda and are framework based but not prescriptive.

Chris Halward, Programmes Director, NOA, said: “To develop outsourcing as a profession, it seems sensible that a talent programme should reflect that outsourcing is part of everyday business now. Talented individuals who do not understand outsourcing will struggle unless they realise the process.

“This process can be demonstrated through knowledge of the NOA Lifecycle which provides a recognised flexible framework to guide companies and individuals through the outsourcing process.”

NOA also announced it will be awarding post nominals for the Diploma and Professional Certificate. The NOA believe that post nominals will enable individuals who have invested in their professional development to be more easily recognised and may go some way to solve the issue of self-promotion in the industry.

So while the outsourcing industry can only go from strength to strength with the increasing flexibility of models, cost effective use of new technology and prospective surge in public sector contracts - the amount of growth and recognition will ultimately depend on the management, recognition and development of one area. The people.

Microsoft’s departing software chief has urged the company to move on from its base of Windows and Office and look to global web devices.

Ray Ozzie made his mark with his ‘Internet Services Disruption’ memo which is seen by many as Microsoft’s manifesto for internet based cloud computing.

Ozzie has made the call for simplicity within Microsoft’s applications as many new smartphones are released in November.

Ozzie said: "Let's mark this 5-year milestone by once again fearlessly embracing that which is technologically inevitable.”

"The next five years will bring about yet another inflection point -- a transformation that will once again yield unprecedented opportunities for our company and our industry catalyzed by the huge and inevitable shift in apps and infrastructure that's truly now just begun."

Indian Outsourcer HCL has announced that it will target the UK public sector very “aggressively”.

Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL, said "public sector outsourcing contracts are inefficient. They have to be measured against global benchmarks and open to more people... You cannot take from citizens and give to companies that are hugely inefficient."

The government is currently cutting the amount if spends with some of its biggest suppliers which include Atos Origin, Accenture and Capgemini.

Nayer insisted the cost-cutting doesn't have to come at the expense of innovation: "It's not about cost arbitrage, it's not about moving jobs from the UK to India - it's about innovation... and innovation will come from the use of technology," he said.

Despite the public sector cost-cutting agenda, Nayar said any UK government work undertaken by HCL could be carried out onshore, rather than in lower-cost offshore locations such as India.

Nayer said "We will be happy to deliver 100 per cent of services from the UK.”

George Osborne has said that GDP figures show recovery is steady

George Osborne has said that the UK economic performance figures show the recovery is "steady" which is better than expected at this time.

Osborne said the "lion's share" of the recovery had come from the private sector.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests the economy grew at 0.8% between July and September - twice the rate expected by many analysts.

The chancellor said this would improve confidence, with Treasury sources adding it showed the risk of a "double-dip" recession was being overplayed.

But Labour said the speed of spending cuts could damage the recovery.

The latest gross domestic product (GDP) figure follows 1.2% growth in the second quarter of the year, and is double the 0.4% expected by analysts. But the data is only a first estimate, and may be revised.

Google and VMware have launched a series of collaborative java tools at the SpringOne 2GX conference. It is hoped that the tools will help and encourage developers to look at new innovative ways to build applications with the cloud environment.

Rod Johnson, vice-president at VMware, said: “Together Google and VMware enable enterprises to develop and deploy rich Spring Java applications across multiple clouds and devices.”

Google plans to incorporate mobile-influenced features in the longer term such as user interfaces, app cache and local databases.

Vic Gundotra, Google vice-president of developer platforms, said: “By making deployments of Spring Java applications on Google App Engine using Google Web Toolkit generally available, developers can deploy Java applications in production environments of their choice while leveraging rich web front-end across multiple devices.”

IBM has addressed security fears associated with cloud computing as research shows that security and privacy issues are still the top concerns.

An IBM global survey of 500 IT managers has shown that 77% of businesses believe that cloud computing requires a privacy trade-off. 50% were worried that cloud could also lead to a data breach, and 23% fear that cloud computing will weaken corporate security.

IBM has tried to address these concerns by announcing a new strategy roadmap and various security assessments. IBM also announced that it has several projects under way such as the Integrated Trusted Data Centre project to harden infrastructure by isolating more of its components.

Underlying security mechanisms can verify the integrity and correct configuration of on infrastructure components which can prevent low-level attacks such as identity imitation and spoofing.

Steve Robinson, general manager of IBM Security Solutions, said: “IBM understands the ‘one size fits all’ cloud security strategy will not work for most businesses. Our enterprise clients are looking for a trusted advisor to provide the right mix of security consulting services and offerings to match. By offering these new services and innovations, we aim to help clients create tailored solutions that will allow them to get the most out of their cloud environments.”

Chile is hoping that its success in rescuing the 33 trapped miners will translate into some successful outsourcing business for the nation.

Juan Carlos Munoz, CEO of Chile IT, said that even though there are a lot of countries looking to promote themselves as outsourcing destinations, Chile has shown the right values and engineering capability to succeed.

Munoz acknowledged that although the safety measures were not very good - the effort shown by the government confirmed to the world that “Chile really cares for its people.” The precision drilling also demonstrated that Chile’s “engineering capabilities are outstanding” said Munoz.

Chile has a population of 16 million and is expected to raise its IT spending from £2.3 billion this year to £3.4 billion in 2014. Technical outsourcing is about a £1 billion industry, with providers offering services in areas such as engineering, software development, network security and infrastructure.

Chile is hoping to promote its mature infrastructure and skilled workers along with the country’s resilience after its earthquake recovery and minor rescue.

Anand Ramesh, the research director of global sourcing at business consultancy Everest Group said: “It makes people more receptive to the message but I don’t think that the way Chile dealt with its earthquake and mining accident will necessarily tell people they should look at Chile as an outsourcing venue.”

Business Secretary Vince Cable said Britain’s government is listening to the complaints of business about its proposed immigration cap, which companies say is preventing them from bringing in staff they need.

“The message has been heard loud and clear,” Cable said in an interview at the Confederation of British Industry’s annual conference in London. Cable said Prime Minister David Cameron had demonstrated that, when he told the conference yesterday that “as we control our borders and bring immigration to a manageable level, we will not impede you from attracting the best talent from around the world.”

Cable said last month that the temporary cap, in place until the government implements a permanent measure, was “very damaging” to the British economy. CBI Director-General Richard Lambert backed him, saying it was “causing some really big companies some significant pain.”

“Executives have to come and go. That has to be done in the framework of an overall cap on immigration,” Cable said. He refused to characterize it as a victory for his department. “It’s not winning or losing, it’s reconciling two different things.”

Companies provide “one-stop shop” for integrated storage solutions to help customers gain greater IT value and efficiency

Fujitsu and NetApp today announced they are extending their strong, long-standing global partnership to help customers maximise the value they get from their IT investments. IT leaders today are under increasing pressure to respond faster to the needs of the business. With this agreement, the two companies deliver one-stop shopping for integrated storage solutions that accelerate business results for their customers. The expanded global partnership and extended resale agreements continue a long track record of delivering customer success, allowing business customers to increase their IT efficiency and standardisation and satisfy all of their unified storage foundation needs with Fujitsu and NetApp.

As part of the extended partnership, the companies will offer a shared portfolio of products to meet the integrated storage needs of business customers. NetApp will resell the Fujitsu ETERNUS CS800 S2 Data Protection Appliance in 22 countries across EMEA. Fujitsu will expand its resale of NetApp’s unified storage systems to more markets worldwide. Maintenance and support services as well as managed services across the full shared portfolio will continue to be supplied by Fujitsu, the third-largest global IT services company.

“Fujitsu’s global partnership with NetApp creates a well-matched and comprehensive storage portfolio that benefits our customers first and foremost,” said Kazuhiro Igarashi, president of the Storage Systems Unit, Fujitsu Limited. “We’ve simplified how customers can buy integrated solutions as part of our comprehensive Dynamic Infrastructures portfolio, and helped them increase IT efficiency and flexibility. Fujitsu customers see the value we provide with NetApp, not the least due to Fujitsu’s global service expertise across the combined product range.”

Source: http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/news/pr/fs_20101026-b.html