Industry news

Research published today by ContactBabel, the contact centre industry analysts, reveals that the past 2 years has seen a 440% increase in the number of complaints about the failures and shortcomings of UK banks. In real terms, this means a jump from almost 2.8m negative calls in 2008 to over 12.2m in 2010.

However, it is not the case that the performance or quality of banks' contact centre staff has declined: the proportion of complaints directed at the failings of the contact centre's staff has reduced from 21% to 14% in that same timescale, with the vast and growing majority of customer complaints being about the workings and processes of the bank itself (up from 79% in 2008 to 86% in 2010).

Generally, the recession has driven more consumers to display negativity, stress and intolerance of mistakes, as well as there being general under-investment by companies, which has worsened the problems with the business processes that cause many of these complaints. Negative feelings towards financial services institutions, and specific issues around bank charges and the fall-out of the credit crunch have created many very unhappy customers who are now far more prone to complain than had previously been the case.

"The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide (8th edition - 2010)", is a major study of over 200 UK contact centre operations, looking at all areas of contact centre performance, investment, technology, HR and strategy. This year, it is available entirely free of charge from http://www.contactbabel.com.

The report's author, Steve Morrell, commented:

"It is no surprise the finance and banking sector comes out of this worst-off. In 2008, only 1.2% of calls made to banks were complaints - in 2010, that figure had increased by more than seven-fold to 8.5%. However, as the overall number of calls to banks' UK contact centres has diminished since 2008, due to an increase in self-service and offshore support, the actual number of complaints has not risen by quite as much, although a 440% increase is certainly cause for alarm.

"Across every business sector - not just the banks - the vast amount of complaints received by a contact centre are not about how the staff handle calls, but rather about a failure of processes elsewhere in the organisation. However, it's the contact centre that has to deal with the dirty work, and further failures within the complaints and resolutions procedure (or lack of it) can see customers calling into the contact centre again and again, becoming more irate each time, despite the real problem lying outside the contact centre.

"There is a real risk, especially within large contact centres and in those that operate offshore as well as in the UK, that a single agent does not have the capability or responsibility to deal with the customer’s issue. It may be that various internal departments (e.g. finance, billing, provisioning and technical support), need to work together to resolve the issue, but in many businesses, getting someone to take responsibility for sorting out the problem is a long and complex process in itself.

"This widespread and short-sighted failure of businesses to see the contact centre as part of a larger organic whole is the main reason that many people dislike using contact centres: too often, agents are simply not given the tools they need to solve the customer's problem."

Source: http://www.contactbabel.com/reports.cfm

The number of businesses in the United States and other countries that have outsourced jobs to India has been staggering. One of the main reasons behind this growing trend is the number of talented workers in India who are performing business tasks for a mere fraction of what they would cost in the West. Price is not the only factor. There are many other reasons why India is the prime choice for outsourcing.

The English Language

Due to British colonization, many Indians can speak fluent English. This is one big advantage that other Asian countries don’t have. No intepreters are required, there are fewer misunderstandings and business communication can flow freely. This is why the call center industry has exploded in India. Customers calling from Canada, the United States and Britain can make inquiries and voice their concerns with ease. Despite the use of different idioms, Westerners generally don’t have to worry that the person on the other end of the line will be speaking in an unintelligible language.

Highly Educated Workforce

The Indians have proven themselves to be quite adept at developing software, and the quality of the work is being recognized as meeting acceptable international standards. Western companies are also finding the Indians useful for performing other tasks relating to financial reports, accounting, tax processing, photo editing services and more. Computer literacy among Indian workers is high and this is what gives the country a leg up on the competition. Universities are adding more graduates to the pool of skilled workers each year and seeing as they are young, they can adapt to change more easily.

More Open to Doing Business

Up until reforms began in 1991, India was seen as an almost impossible market to crack. The License Raj was put in place after independence in 1947, and the rules were so confusing and hard to navigate that it’s no wonder the country’s economic progress was minimal. Indian leaders knew they would be in serious trouble unless they made some big changes quickly. Today, foreign investors are coming back to India in droves. Companies that were once prohibited from setting up operations are being allowed to enter the market. India’s legal system has been influenced by the British colonialists and Western businesspeople feel more comfortable in this type of environment.

A Matter of Geography

India is located in a rather convenient time zone. At about the same time as American workers are heading home, the Indians are waking up. Somebody in the U.S. who can’t work late can send jobs that need to be finished to India. By the next morning, they will be completed. This is great for productivity, because the work continues and fewer tasks are overlooked.

Source:http://lindazengyuanqun.typepad.com/blog/2010/09/reasons-why-india-is-a-favorite-outsourcing-hub-.html

The University of the Arts London (UAL) is to overhaul its ICT infrastructure in a bid to deliver and maintain a “truly agile” desktop infrastructure.

UAL, the largest arts university in Europe, has become the first institution on this side of the Atlantic to sign up to the new Citrix Campus Agreement in the process, which will allow for greater desktop flexibility across its six Colleges.

The University has worked alongside ICT consultancy firm Centralis in developing the strategy, which will include the ability to deliver and maintain a single desktop/application to multiple devices across multiple locations including an ever increasing Apple Mac community where the users can subscribe to the applications they need.

“The University has been investigating various methods of delivering desktops and applications from a central point, but was unsure whether this would be best suited using VDI, TS, physical or a mix,” says Adam Atkinson, desktop manager at University of the Arts London. “The time required to fully assess the different solutions and technologies was a daunting prospect knowing that one delivery method would not suit all of our users. We can now focus on how best to deliver the applications and desktops rather than worrying about the licensing requirements for each technology.”

Patricia Reid, IT Support Manager, Central Services and Licensing at University of the Arts London added, “It has taken the HE education sector nearly five years to achieve this agreement through discussions with Citrix, EduServe and UCISA to make it more cost effective for us to license our Citrix environment. UAL have been working with Centralis and Citrix for a few years now with a view to one day having a Campus wide licence and now it is here there was no doubt in my mind that we will make use of it as it will be more cost effective for the University.”

The new licensing model is based on a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) count of both students and staff at a fixed price, and includes unlimited access campus-wide, work at home rights and flexible subscription benefits. Under the terms of the agreement, UAL will be able to fully utilise several Citrix technologies, including XenDesktop 4 and EdgeSight, a real-time system-monitoring tool, and further leverage previous investment in the Citrix Access Gateway.

Signing the Agreement comes ahead of a planned move for one campus, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, to new premises in Kings Cross, which is expected to take place next year. UAL is hoping to introduce thin client devices in the new building and will be covered for this under the terms of the Campus Agreement.

Alex Weeks, IT Systems Manager at University of the Arts London says, “Our aim is always to streamline and improve our IT provision for staff and students. The Campus Agreement allows us access to the latest technology at a fixed price point, essential from our point of view as an educational establishment.”

“We have worked with Centralis to deploy Citrix products for a number of years and have positive feedback from staff already using the Access Gateway product. It also allows us to plan for the future expansion to the student body and development of a new location.”

Ewen Anderson, managing director at Centralis says, “University of the Arts London is made up of some of the most renowned art colleges in the world and Centralis is proud to have been working with them for the last seven years to increase both the quality and reach of their IT solutions. Given the challenges of the move and requirement to deliver services to multiple colleges across London, it is no surprise to see them being the first to take advantage of the new licensing and it will certainly help to minimise disruption for staff and students.”

Source: http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/education/uni-arts-london-overhaul-ict-infrastructure

The impact of the October cuts may be more severe than anticipated in the public sector because there are insufficient ICT staff with the right skills to salvage the situation through better use of technology to preserve front-line service delivery at reduced expenditure.

That was the pessimistic view of some experts talking at last week's 360 Degree IT event in London, who fret there are too few IT entry-level people coming into the sector with the optimal mix of business and hi-tech savvy.

Some 150,000 people a year are recruited to the UK IT sector per year, education consultant with the Open University Tim Rault-Smith told the audience - but 40% of British employers say the level of business, non-technical and interpersonal skills of new entrants to be disappointing.

That's a problem if the Coalition's aims to make huge cuts from Government is matched by improved efficiencies in performance at both central and local government level, he said. Staff will need to hit the ground running in a very tough environment, he went on – pointing out that CBI data suggests some 62% of new IT entrants need to draw on business skills almost immediately they are in post.

“There's a gap between the skills new people come to the industry with and what they need from day one,” he concluded.

His University is one of several trying to work with the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology, e-Skills UK, to provide a top-up qualification that could beef up new IT professional's business capability – the proposed e-Skills Professional Programme.

Things like this could also be useful for helping employees currently in IT “who are trapped by a glass ceiling” and frustrated they are unable break out into wider business management, Rault-Smith suggested.

Source: http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/central-gov/cuts-will-bite-worse-ict-people-will-struggle-talk-business

Transport giant FirstGroup has awarded a range of IT contracts to Atos Origin and Computacenter, for IT support, IT user service desk, email management and datacentres and hosting at its UK operations. FirstGroup, the UK's largest bus and train operator, let contracts worth £36.2 million in total. The largest is a £11.8 million, five-year contract for datacentre and hosting, which has been won by Atos Origin.

Under the terms of this contract, Atos will host and support a number of FirstGroup’s IT systems – a mix of Wintel, Linux and Unix environments. The supplier will also host the related LAN and SAN infrastructure, with both physical and virtualised infrastructure expected to be provided. The systems will include back office applications, engineering systems and front office ticketing systems. FirstGroup said that some of the IT systems will require disaster recovery to a second active data centre. In addition, Atos Origin will provide managed email and collaborative services for up to 20,000 mailboxes as part of a five-year, £2.1 million contract. This will include email, instant messaging, calendar and mobile messaging services.

Meanwhile, under a five-year, £8.2 million IT support contract, Computacenter will provide IT support and technical delivery of FirstGroup’s distributed infrastructure. This will include management support of the company’s 10,000 end user devices, servers and LAN infrastructure across 630 sites in the UK.

Computacenter will also supply an ITIL-based IT service desk to handle all first line calls from FirstGroup’s end users, and the required infrastructure to handle the company’s IT service requests, as part of a five-year £5.9 million contract. The service desk will support service requests for back office systems, personal productivity systems and rail and bus-specific operational systems. In an additional contract, FirstGroup awarded a £8.2 million, 44-month contract to Global Crossing Telecommunications for the supply, operation and support of its Wide Area Network in the UK.

The network will be required to support all types of data, including voice. While the network will initially cover all the company’s sites, the Global Crossing may have to expand its services to Europe and North America, as required. Earlier this year, FirstGroup signed a multi-million pound application development, installation and support contract with Atos Origin.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3241204/firstgroup-picks-atos-origin-computacenter-and-global-crossing/

Columbus IT has secured a major new win with the leading Agri-Nutrition provider, Origin Enterprises plc. Origin has chosen to invest in Columbus IT's industry solution based on a Microsoft Dynamics AX business platform that offers competitive advantages in a changing economy and rapidly growing market. In the coming months Columbus IT will supply and implement a comprehensive ERP solution to Origin, one of the leading suppliers of integrated agronomy services, crop nutrition and feed ingredients, to the UK, Polish and Irish

agricultural sectors.

“Origin's new solution is an important step towards achieving our goal of becoming the preferred IT supplier in this sector. The solution will be supplied and implemented by Columbus IT's UK & Ireland division, which was named the best performing AX partner and Columbus country by

Microsoft in 2009. The agreement with Origin cements the UK's position as top performer in the group,” says group managing director Claus E. Hansen, Columbus IT.

Based on Microsoft Dynamics AX, the IT solution includes project management, consultancy and software licences. The agreement, which provides Origin with a total IT solution adapted to the agronomy, fertiliser and feed ingredient industries, incorporates significant advantages that will help Origin achieve its strategic objectives over the coming years. Customers want to be challenged.The new IT solution helps to ensure Origin's ambitious growth strategy. Experience, credibility and process understanding were crucial when Origin's management were faced with the task of selecting a new IT supplier.

“It was the quality of the IT systems coupled with Columbus IT's in-depth expertise in process oriented manufacturing that tipped the scales in their favour. The match between Origin's growth ambitions and Columbus IT's working methods differentiates the group from other suppliers in the Dynamics market. Columbus IT helps us to migrate several different systems into one Microsoft-based platform where all the elements are in tune,” says CIO Derek Wilson, Origin, who adds: “We were looking for a simple platform that delivers real benefits and enables us to grow. We chose Columbus IT because we knew they could deliver a solution tailored to our business model and one which would enable us to continue to develop the quality and breadth of our services to our customers.”

For Columbus, the significant demand for vertical solutions together with several strategically important recent wins across the globe is a cause for optimism, which is why the company is now intensifying its collaboration with Microsoft. “Our collaboration with Microsoft is crucial to our global business strategy and we are therefore targeting our efforts to improve the partnership. With the support of Microsoft and our ongoing development of sector-specific solutions we

are able to drive sales and move towards achieving our established goal of dominating our key focus industries, namely retail and project- and process-oriented manufacturing companies in the agri/food sector,” says Corporate SVP Sales Henrik P. Salicath, Columbus IT. Origin's new solution is based on Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 and includes process optimisation of production and distribution. The system will be implemented in the course of 2010 and will be deployed to all businesses by 2012.

“We are confident that Columbus working alongside our own staff will ensure the implementation of a critical business application The new solution enables us to improve what we do and how we do it thus generating value for all our stakeholders, including our people, our customers and our partners,” says CIO Derek Wilson, Origin.

Source: Corporate SVP Sales Henrik P. Salicath, Columbus IT A/S

Swiss Post Solutions Limited is pleased to announce it has won a three-year contract to provide mailroom services to the Nationwide.

Swiss Post Solutions was selected by Nationwide and their support services company, Carillion plc. Carillion have been managing property services at Nationwide's key administration offices and data centres in Swindon, Northampton and Bournemouth since September 2008. The success of this partnership was recognised in 2009, when Carillion won Nationwide's Supplier of the Year Award.

Carillion and Swiss Post Solutions have an even longer relationship having delivered services for six high profile clients over a six year period. Swiss Post Solutions has a Preferred Supplier Agreement with Carillion, and both have a very strong and enviable reputation in serving the financial services sector. This is a significant contract win for Swiss Post Solutions. In the UK, Nationwide is proud to be the third largest mortgage and savings provider, serving its members in around 700 branches across the country and via its online and telephone banking service.

Under the terms of the contract Swiss Post Solutions will be responsible for mailroom operations at the head office in Swindon, and the sites in Northampton and Bournemouth, including the handling of all incoming and outgoing mail at these locations. Around 8,000,000 items of mail are handled annually across all three sites. The Company will also manage the goods-in services at Swindon and Northampton. Swiss Post Solutions' aim is to enable employees quicker, easier access to information which will achieve further service improvements for Nationwide's members, and will support the building society as a successful organisation in the financial services sector.

Swiss Post Solutions will also install their iTrak solution – a system for tracking inbound signature deliveries. The state-of-the-art technology creates a consistent audit trail for incoming mail and enables a document or package to be tracked from the moment it arrives in the building to when it reaches the intended recipient’s desk. Commenting on the award of the contract Chris Shott ,Head of Business Logistics, Nationwide, said:

'We were seeking a specialist mailroom company that had a good understanding of how the financial services sector works. We are pleased to be working with Swiss Post Solutions, and have every confidence that their bespoke, scaleable mailroom solutions will help improve our workflow, enabling our primary business to be supported by outstanding backroom functions.’

Nationwide were looking for a partner that would not just deliver cost reductions, but would offer best practice in its delivery of service and support. With 34 employees transferring across to Swiss Post Solutions, Nationwide wanted to be sure their former employees would be fully supported:

'Cost savings and service improvement were important criteria for us but the cultural fit and people skills had to be right too. We were impressed by Swiss Post Solutions' commitment to staff training and personal development,' continued Chris.

Swiss Post Solutions has a strong reputation in the financial services sector, providing mailroom services to the world's leading banks, insurers and professional advisers. The Company is Britain’s leading provider of outsourced mailroom services and a specialist in integrated document outsourcing services. Swiss Post Solutions has achieved a threefold increase in turnover since 2004 and profits have continued to increase above this rate. Due to its focus on building and maintaining customer relationships, Swiss Post Solutions has also seen a significant increase in the average contract duration and enjoys near-perfect retention rates. Jonathan King, CEO of Swiss Post Solutions Limited UK & Ireland, is extremely pleased to have been awarded the contract:

'We are delighted that Nationwide and Carillion have chosen Swiss Post Solutions to be their partner and we look forward to working with them both to streamline services and deliver increased efficiencies to Nationwide's operations. As a leading provider of mail and document outsourcing services to the financial services sector we look forward to a happy and mutually rewarding relationship.'

Source: Swiss Post Solutions

Traditionally, businesses seeking to expand their contact center capabilities without deploying additional costly premise-based technologies have had two options: enter into a hosted or managed services contract with a contact center outsourcer, or outsource their technological requirements to a service provider. Over the last decade, network, routing, and application improvements have helped introduce a new deployment paradigm that combines key elements of hosted contact center technology and home agents: the virtual contact center.

A virtual contact center is a group of contact center assets (agent and in-the-cloud technologies) that exist in different physical locations but function as a single, fully integrated, seamless contact center operation. Virtual contact centers combine home agents with hosted contact center technologies providing for the “customer service in the cloud” model.

Virtualization enables enterprises to re-engineer their network routing, queuing, and workforce management in their contact center operations, resulting in efficiency gains and cost reduction. The key advantage of virtual contact centers is that over time efficiency gains and cost reduction are amplified as enterprises are able to better predict shifting customer patterns and allocate resources quicker and manage campaigns more effectively.

Vast improvements in network performance, switching and routing, and workforce management technologies have created an ideal environment for virtual contact centers. But while the virtual contact center is the shiny object in today’s contact center realm, it will take time for deployments to ramp up and for enterprises to get comfortable with this deployment model. Most enterprises that have a virtual contact center deployment use it in conjunction with their existing bricks-and-mortar contact centers and branch locations.

Organizations interested in virtual contact centers have three primary concerns: quality assurance (agent monitoring and data protection); business continuity (dynamic inbound routing); and agent motivation (collaboration tools and performance-based incentives).

The contact center is a critical point for any enterprise concerned about business agility. A well-managed contact center should be a vital source of business intelligence, as well as an effective path to meeting customer needs. A virtual contact center should have a set of well-defined processes in place to ensure that agents are performing at the level of quality that enterprises expect. In addition, enterprises should make sure that information can travel upwards from the agent to the enterprise to extract business intelligence.

Contact center agents should be screened carefully before they are hired, and after hiring should have pre-determined limits on information access. Confidential customer data must be securely protected at all times. Innovative uses of interactive voice response (IVR) technology allow callers to provide and receive sensitive personal information (such as Social Security numbers) while restricting the contact center agent from hearing or accessing that data.

One of the major advantages of a virtual contact center is what it offers in terms of scalability and business continuity. Enterprises should expect that call routing patterns can instantly be adjusted to absorb an unexpected spike in call volume. If a given set of agents is suddenly unable to take calls, incoming calls should then be seamlessly routed to the next available skilled agent, and this shift should be invisible to the customer. Routing rules should be flexible and easily changed.

Maintaining high agent morale and team spirit is a challenge for widely dispersed home agents. Since agents in a virtual contact center do not share the same physical space, virtual contact centers must take extra measures to ensure morale remains high and agents are able to give each other the benefit of their experiences. Social networks have been used with success to help remote agents build a sense of community and ask work-related questions. Another strategy is to provide agents with structured performance-based incentives, which can include giving high-performing agents more access to coveted time slots. Associated with this strategy, agents are kept constantly aware of their performance relative to their peers via clearly defined metrics.

There has been a flurry of major acquisitions in the technology sector in recent weeks, both in the UK and on the other side of the Atlantic. HP gazumped Dell to land storage firm 3PAR, while also bagging security companies Fortify and most recently ArcSight.

Intel, meanwhile, agreed to buy security giant McAfee, and bought Infineon’s wireless solutions business. Not to be outdone, IBM acquired both marketing software firm Unica and document and data capture specialist Datacap last month.

In the UK technology sector, this year has already beaten 2009 for takeovers, clocking up £2.9bn in deals compared with last year’s £1.1bn, according to the Financial Times.

But why are companies so keen to spend millions, and sometimes billions, on acquisitions, and why now?

Desire to acquire

Deepak Jain, senior vice president and global head of technology infrastructure services at IT services firm Wipro believes that the best time to acquire is, counter-intuitively, when you don’t need to.

“We spoke to a large financial institution that deals with mergers and acquisitions, and its view was that you should always acquire when you don’t need to,” he said. “That’s the time when you’ll pay the right price. If you’re desperate and have to push the deal through today, you’ll pay more.”

Part of the reason for the sudden glut of acquisitions could be that some organisations are suddenly finding themselves flushed with cash, following last year’s often precautionary belt-tightening.

For some organisations, acquisition is a publicly stated part of their strategy. This is certainly the case with HP, which has spent more than £5bn growing its software business in this way. According to Ian May, vice president of HP software and solutions, the software business currently earns about half of that figure per year, and the aim is to double that over the next five years, partly through further acquisitions.

So why do large organisations such as HP pursue this strategy?

“You acquire companies for three reasons,” May said. “You either want the customer base, the clever people, or the technology – or a combination of those. At the moment, there are a lot of acquisitions because people want the technology.

“Acquiring a firm for its technology is often much more cost effective than developing it in-house where the time to market would be too great and you may have missed the opportunity,” he added.

May argued that when technology was more proprietary, firms would be acquired for their customer base, as it was the only way to break into a new market since replacing a system with something entirely new was often very difficult. Today, organisations are seeking to fill the gaps in their portfolios.

Wipro’s Jain said that acquiring a company for its people, and specifically their skills, is also a valid strategy.

“We acquired cMango a few years back for its expertise in BMC software. It was the skills and knowledge base of their staff that interested us. I can build skills [in my staff], but it could take one to two years. If you want to serve your customers’ needs today, the best way is to acquire.”

Building the empire

The recent acquisitions made by major vendors such as HP, IBM and Intel also suggest that these suppliers are keen to become one-stop shops for their customers, with storage and security high on the agenda.

Amichai Shulman is CTO at Imperva, a data security firm. He explained that large infrastructure providers such as HP and IBM have realised that security needs to be integrated into their offering.

“We’re seeing companies such as HP, IBM and Intel acquiring and adding more and more security solutions into their portfolio. They understand that security is part of what makes IT tick,” he said.

However, Jain explained that it is not always necessary to acquire in order to build up your organisation’s offering.

“Look at Cisco,” he said. “The company found it better to create a new model, one of coalition rather than acquisition. Now it can offer additional services to acquire a larger customer share.”

Whatever the reason or method behind the acquisition, one area where IT leaders agree is that it greatly aids time to market.

“We have always found that our acquisitions have given us an advantage,” said Jain. “If we had tried to build the business on our own, it would have taken longer.”

Source: http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2270048/why-companies-getting#ixzz10j4HTAhY

Suffolk County Council's decision to slash its £1.1 billion budget by 30% by outsourcing almost all its services has caused controversy, with unions warning that the plan will put a number of jobs at risk.

The decision is seen as one that could open the door for other councils to use outsourcing, turning local authorities from providers of public services, to enabling councils that commission others to carry out services.

Dave Prentis, Unison general secretary, said: ??"This is not the way to run council services. There will be no democratic accountability. It is a disgrace that the council has not asked the public, or council workers, what they think.

"Leaving vital services like child protection, home care and support for young people to the vagaries of the market is very dangerous. Services will be sold off to the lowest bidder, starting a race to the bottom. People using local services, and those working to provide them, will pay the price. ??Unison will be working with the local community to challenge these damaging plans."

But Martyn Hart, chairman of the National Outsourcing Association (NOA), said: "There are a number of reasons why councils and other public-sector bodies would wish to outsource - and it's important to note that they are not all linked to cost savings. Outsourcing can help to provide new and different skills, increase the capacity of the workforce, and help to deliver outcomes quicker and more efficiently.

"Indeed, the actual cost savings made can depend on a number of different variables, such as exactly what is being outsourced, what state the services were in before the contracts start, as well as what the council's expectations are.

"Typically, cost savings in the public sector are usually made over a longer period of time, but given a stable set of services at a reasonable pricing level there is the possibility that suppliers can provide cost savings from day one. However, it's worth pointing out that if it's a slick process already, and the public sector organisation is looking to outsource, they may not save as much, they might even consider offering it as a shared service.

"My advice for other councils looking to adopt this model would be to conduct a thorough examination of your core competencies and your ability to perform all the tasks you have. If you find that you not good at a non-core task then outsourcing is an obvious choice.

"Public-sector organisations that are interested in how others have tackled outsourcing, shared services and even in-sourcing should contact the NOA to attend our public sector austerity seminar on Thursday 30 September."

Source: http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/channel/news/article/1030879/Suffolk-County-Councils-plan-outsource-services-dangerous-says-unions/