Industry news

Although outsourcing is not a new concept, the industry has experienced a period of phenomenal growth in recent years, as busy companies increasingly turn to external providers to fulfil highly administrative or poorly served functions of their business. And, as the industry has evolved in size and expertise, so too has the nature of the tasks that are being outsourced. Today’s companies are not just looking to outsource business processes, such as back-office functions, call centres, human resources, IT, and business process outsourcing (BPO).

Based on its success, they’re also turning to off-shore providers for knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and legal process outsourcing (LPO), as the race for cost savings has given way to the race for skills.

A helping hand

So, does LPO work and is it suitable for intellectual property (IP) industries? The simple answer is yes. In our fast-paced industries, businesses need to strive for continual innovation in order to ensure competitive advantage. Without back-end support, such progress would not be possible. The hunt for competitive advantage translates into greater legal, particularly IP, activity. That’s not just in the number of patents that companies seek to register and protect, but also in the trend to actively ‘farm’ patent estates. Without external help managing the administrative side of the IP work, few corporations would be able to keep up with or afford to properly develop their IP portfolios.

IP currently accounts for over 45% of the LPO market and is expected to lead the growth in this sector in the next three to five years. The service mix already includes basic IP services, such as proofreading and paralegal support, but as low-end IP administrative tasks are outsourced with success, companies are electing to off-shore more complex tasks to trusted suppliers. They are leveraging the experience and talent off-shore to improve processes, and apply the benefits of scale and technology.

An increased emphasis on merger and acquisition (M&A) activity since 2004, has provided part of the reason for this growth. IP due diligence is fundamentally important in all M&A activity, and increasingly in private equity and venture capital deals. This has big implications for IP departments as it also generates large volumes of work in tight timeframes, distracting staff from otherwise core activities. If forced to manage the work internally, companies are faced with increasing costs, backlogs and delays in work, and compromises in the quality of the work being produced.

The rising cost of office space, the scarcity of skilled staffing in the developed world and the challenge to manage the peaks in workload all put pressure on a company’s bottom line. LPO has enabled companies to increase productivity and capacity, to achieve scale and bandwidth to operations. It also satisfies board pressure to leverage IP and keep costs down, while still maintaining (or even improving) quality of work.

The growth in worldwide patenting activity over the past decade has also meant that national patent and trademark offices are struggling to keep up with the speed of innovation. In 2005 (the most recent data available), the European Patent Office (EPO) had 119,800 patent searches pending, and this figure is due to grow by 24% each year. Similarly, in 2006, the US Patent Office (USPTO) revealed details of a backlog exceeding 700,000 patent applications – and the situation looked all too familiar at the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) in 2005, when its backlog hit 790,000. At that point the JPO took action and outsourced 25% of its prior art searches to help get back on top of the escalating workload. The move to outsource and increase capacity at the JPO was welcomed by industry, too, since application delays can mean that precious patent licensing opportunities are lost.

In such an aggressive environment, outsourcing is no longer a choice – the question is not whether a business should outsource, but instead, how best to do it. "We all know that outsourcing is not just about cost take-out any more. Done right, outsourcing will make your organisation more nimble, more agile, and more competitive, " said Kevin Campbell, 2007 group chief executive Outsourcing, Accenture.

Choosing the right partner

Ultimately, it is the importance of quality, not cost, that is driving growth in the LPO marketplace. That’s why companies looking to offshore or outsource key tasks should be looking for an experienced partner that is able to assure quality of work, as well as manage risk, guarantee data security, export control, interoperability of data and smooth transfer of work.

In IP industries in particular, there is now also a growing trend towards multisourcing and multishoring, where corporations and law firms select not to outsource a variety of in-house tasks to one expert supplier or global jurisdiction, but instead select the best (or most innovative) supplier or the best jurisdiction for each task. Better still they find a supplier that has the breadth and scope to provide the appropriate specialist multi-discipline expertise and a multi-shore option.

At the very basic level, businesses should be outsourcing non-core and lower-value activities, leaving in-house staff to focus on their core value and added-value activities to drive earnings growth. Working on the concept that highly trained, outsourced IP specialists can lift the burden of managing the IP prosecution process, many law firms are also now choosing to off-shore more key IP tasks. Clifford Chance is just one example of a global law firm that has chosen to partner with an India-based outsourcing company to manage its key financial services. US-based Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth (SLWK) is another, but it chose to establish its own captive IP-outsourcing company in 1999 to achieve this.

There were practical reasons for setting it up in India, explains Steve W Lundberg, founding partner: "In the late 1990s, there was a labour shortage in Minneapolis (home to SLWK’s first office) of qualified personnel to do certain functions like proofing and lower level case management."

Tapping into the bank of talent in India allowed the firm to increase capacity, improve cycle time and retain complete control, all without sacrificing quality or security. And, as corporations become more wary of the hourly charge of legal counsel, IP outsourcing also provided SLWK with the opportunity to pass on cost savings to its clients – a benefit that few competitors could provide at the time.

Sidestepping the pitfalls

Be sure to use an already existing and experienced supplier, the same rules apply to outsourcing as they do to any key business task: focus on quality, implement robust processes, certification, security and risk management practices, and apply good governance practices. Outsourcing is no stroll in the park and there have been several high-profile failures where the wrong processes have been outsourced to the wrong areas. A good supplier will eliminate these difficulties and the chances are if they are a global service provider, they will be able to select the best talent at the best locations for the required tasks.

Companies shouldn’t be afraid to scrutinise the security and confidentiality provisions when choosing a supplier. They should also be looking for a proven track record of quality service delivery, guaranteed service level agreements, highly-trained staff and state-of-the-art facilities.

The key is to outsource, but to be able to manage and track the progress of your outsourced work. Many service providers have procedures in place that guarantee the highest levels of client confidentiality and professional delivery. These will also enable real-time workflow delivery, enabling executives to monitor the quality of their services for a fraction of the usual time.

What does this mean for your business?

Setting up an outsourcing programme takes time, but compared to hiring a new department or multiple numbers of specialist legal staff, the process is quicker and easier to manage. It’s also more economical and makes you more agile in the market, enabling you to upscale or downscale as required.

For the IP world, it holds real advantages as volumes increase and skilled professionals become harder to source. Businesses should look at their current set-up, check their financial position and choose a provider with strong sector experience and a reliable reputation.

• With nearly a 40-year history of solving complex challenges for the legal community, CPA is a provider of outsourced IP, litigation support and contract management solutions. CPA’s clients include leading law firms and corporations worldwide, and CPA has a record of providing tools and solutions to help them realise value by managing risk, cost and capacity. www.cpaglobal.com

I thought I should draw your attention to one or two of the latest features on sourcingfocus.com this week – the first full week for our new community. (We've been building the site for some months now and packing it with content. From this week it's your community, so please participate and share your views).

If you click along to our Library section – which, from your feedback, we're going to rename 'Features' – you'll see a number of new pieces by some leading professionals from our industry.

In the piece on legal process outsourcing (LPO), CPA's Rob Stitchbury looks at the importance of this highly specialist function to intellectual-property based businesses. Take a look: it's an erudite and informative read.

I've also commissioned a piece on the challenging and controversial area of outsourcing in the pharmaceuticals market. More than most industries, pharma is dominated by regulation and intense scrutiny (and rightly so) – not to mention the sensitivities inherent in a multibillion-dollar industry at a time when parts of the world are crying out for cheap drugs.

Perhaps most controversial, though, is Jed Mooney's piece on offshore data security – for the simple reason that the implicit message behind his simple, practical and logical best-practice advice is: “do everything the UK government does not”.

If you need proof, here are some examples from Jed's piece:

“No hard media. Data professionals know that the source of nearly all data security lapses is the transfer of information to hard media, such as CD-Roms. State-of-the-art offshore data management providers have no terminals with CD writers – thereby preventing any information being downloaded onto hard media either on purpose or inadvertently. Indeed, laptops are also forbidden ensuring that data stays securely within the confines of the data management centre.

“All data is transmitted online using encryption technologies. The only personnel with the encryption codes are the sender and receiver, i.e. offshore provider and client. This is a very powerful method of ensuring data security, which, when properly firewalled is almost impossible to penetrate. Data transfers of three gigabytes (30 million address records) typically take just a few hours to transmit.

“All transferred data is logged ensuring a permanent record of who has transferred ‘what data’ to ‘whom’ and ‘when’. This ensures complete transparency and accountability.

“All data transfers are acknowledged at the receiving end, i.e. by the client.

"Finally, for ultra-cautious companies, data management can be outsourced offshore yet all data remains in-house and doesn’t even leave the company’s own building."

The conclusion is that if you follow his advice, it won't matter whether the data is transferred five miles from Clerkenwell to Wimbledon, or thousands of miles to the Philippines.

Set against advice that is so eminently sensible and achievable, the government's record of handling our personal data – consider all those stolen laptops and the unencrypted discs lost in internal post – looks like negligence of the most shocking and unprofessional kind.

• Finally a quick comment, if I may, on the depressing and facile tabloid discussions about immigration this week, in the wake of a highly slanted and economically misconceived Lords investigation into the contribution of migrants to the UK economy.

Suddenly we are back in the 1960s and 70s talking about quotas and caps and jobs stolen by overseas workers – a sudden lurch back to Powellite diatribes posited as fact. I think we as an industry should take this opportunity to speak out against this nonsense, as a UK intent on slamming the door against the world can only have a negative impact on the many industries that we touch upon, and which benefit from immigration.

What price can be put on diversity? What price on the extraordinary and unprecedented regeneration of neglected areas of cities such as Leicester, for example? In many cases migrants create new jobs, new sectors, and new opportunities from which we all benefit; in others, they fill roles that simply cannot be filled from the available pools of talent; in most they bring new skills and experiences of the global market.

Of course there are problems in many areas, and within some sections of British society, brought on by skills gaps and the disappearance of traditional labour sectors. Many of these are exacerbated by the funding gap between central and local governments based on inaccurate population statistics.

There has never been a time in our history when we have not been a centre for immigration; and few could seriously claim we are poorer for it. In their heart of hearts, even those who believe that time began in the 1930s know this.

If indulged, short-term anti-immigrant populism never contributes to long-term prosperity, but it is always given credence on the brink of a recession – especially when that downturn is born of easy credit and overspending, not because we have opened our doors to the world.

As reported in News, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has finally announced the completion of a three-way outsourcing deal for its technology and telecoms infrastructure, valued at more than $4 billion.

As expected, the networking and telecoms component is going to AT&T for $1.6 billion; the hosting and storage deal has been clinched by Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems for $1 billion; and the $1 billion computing services and operational integration contract has gone to EDS.

"Partnering with EDS, T-Systems and AT&T gives us greater ability to respond to the growing demands of our businesses. It allows Shell IT to focus on information technology that drives competitive position in the oil and gas market, whilst suppliers focus on improving essential IT capability," said Shell CIO Alan Matula.

Shell expects to keep layoffs to a minimum, it said in the announcement on 31st March, with 3,000 staff going to the outsourcers, and most of the remaining internal teams remaining with Shell.

Terms of the staff transfer have not been revealed, and the union Unite will be watching for any attempt to take on staff on reduced terms and conditions. The union slammed Shell earlier this year when the company inadvertently revealed that job losses would be on lesser terms than for other professional roles within the company.

So what can we learn from this affair? First and foremost that it has been extraordinarily badly handled.

Barely a week ago, Shell said it was undecided on the outsourcing decisions; this would have alarmed and confused an already demotivated IT workforce unnecessarily. In a downturn, especially, decisions about who you work for and under what terms and conditions can be stressful, especially if you have no control over them. Meanwhile, the internal rumour mill will have been working overtime.

In this type of situation – all-too familiar in takeovers, mergers and outsource deals – what normally happens is that by the time a decision has been made, the new employers inherit a depressed and uncooperative workforce at a time when the technical, operational, cultural and managerial aspects of the transfer are at their most complex, expensive and sensitive.

This is not a recipe for a successful outsourcing deal, particularly when your former employer is reporting multibillion-dollar profits in a flatlining economy – both based partly on the price of crude oil.

The other message of this deal is a risky one, long term. If IT is not core to a company such as Shell, then this follows the recent trend of companies redefining themselves around narrower and narrower points of focus. Ever more highly paid management teams guard the organisation's essential IP and brand, with everything else outsourced as a supporting, often low-cost, service.

IT experts risk becoming the 21st century typing pool, hidden not behind flimsy office partitions but behind a wall of management consultants. That doesn't strike me as a secure or healthy future.

CIOs and other executives involved in such decisions should read some of the technology noticeboards and follow the threads that concern their companies; they might not like what they read. These are your future employees; and it is your fault they feel that way.

KPMG, the largest integrated accountancy firm in Europe, has given the go ahead to a £62 million outsourcing agreement with BT. The five-year deal will support a drive towards cost savings, the building of value-added services and improved employee productivity across KPMG UK and Germany.

Bryan Clark, the KPMG partner leading the IT infrastructure consolidation, said: “This is an ambitious outsourcing programme and one that will deliver significant benefits to both our cost base and our effectiveness in serving our Clients.”

BT will manage the delivery of numerous telecommunications services including a fully converged, IP-based, networked telephony infrastructure. The platform will allow additional countries to join if at a later date whilst allowing for greater levels of flexibility and collaboration.

Riding a wave of growing interest in Latin America, EDS has extended its reach in the area, opening a new applications services facility in Argentina’s Buenos Aires. The move is part of the company's aggressive expansion of its multibillion-dollar applications business worldwide.

EDS Argentina has approximately 2,500 employees and operates in Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario and Mendoza. The new facility marks the next step in EDS' ongoing expansion throughout Latin America.

Eduardo Araujo, vice president and regional general manager of EDS Latin America, said: “We intend to keep growing those markets [Latin America] as they have strategic importance to our worldwide operations.”

Multinational oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has finally announced the completion of a three-way outsourcing deal for its technology and telecoms infrastructure, valued at more than $4 billion. The announcement ends months of rumour and speculation about the terms of the deal and its impact on IT employees.

As expected, the networking and telecoms component is going to AT&T for $1.6 billion; the hosting and storage deal has been clinched by Deutsche Telekom enterprise subsidiary T-Systems for $1 billion; and the $1 billion computing services and operational integration contract has gone to EDS.

"Partnering with EDS, T-Systems and AT&T gives us greater ability to respond to the growing demands of our businesses. It allows Shell IT to focus on information technology that drives competitive position in the oil and gas market, whilst suppliers focus on improving essential IT capability," said Shell CIO Alan Matula.

Shell expects to keep layoffs to a minimum, it said in the announcement on 31st March, with 3,000 staff going to the outsourcers, and most of the remaining internal teams remaining with Shell.

The T-Systems element of the deal sees the company take over the infrastructure and IT staff of Shell’s global datacentres including three in the Netherlands and one in both the US and Malaysia. T-Systems will move its U.S. headquarters to Houston, and integrate approximately 900 Shell specialists into its ranks.

"We are delighted that Shell rewarded our commitment to their global IT needs with the largest contract in today’s market. We see their complex environment of over 7,400 application servers as an exciting challenge. This is true global delivery", says Reinhard Clemens, T-Systems’ CEO.

KPMG signs contract with BT in £62m outsourcing deal.

KPMG has signed a five-year, £62m contract with BT to cut costs and boost productivity. The deal will see BT provide network telephony services, including audio- and videoconferencing and will manage KPMG's LAN and WAN connections. The deal will help the company’s expansion while promoting it’s customer service depatment.

In the drive to increase shared services across local government, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils have announced an unprecedented partnership with Fujitsu.

The shared service will be the first Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution in local government and will underpin the Councils’ delivery of back office services including HR, finance and procurement.

Cambridgeshire County Council cabinet member for corporate services, Councillor John Reynolds, said: "This new shared service makes good business sense and fits in with the national requirement for the modernisation of local government, to develop ways to improve the performance and further reduce the cost of our back office processes by sharing appropriate services with like minded councils with the support and expertise available from the private sector.”

To develop the service, Fujitsu has invested in an infrastructure that provides services to the councils’ on a managed service basis whilst offering savings over the cost of traditional stand-alone ERP solutions.

Geoff Neville, local and regional government director at Fujitsu Services commented: “This new shared service is a major step forward in the local government sector for two county councils to share a common ERP solution.”

As reported in News yesterday, Randall S Stephenson, the CEO of US telecoms giant AT&T, caused outrage in the United States by denigrating students there. His comments concerned the problems his company is having sourcing enough workers to fill the 5,000 customer service jobs he promised to return to the US from India.

Only 1,400 of the 5,000 jobs have been sourced from within the US since he made the promise in 2006.

Referring to poorly skilled American school-leavers, he said: "If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down."

"We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he added.

His comments come in the same week as the US Journal of Information Technology Research published a more tactfully worded article entitled Information Systems, Offshore Outsourcing, and Relevancy in the Business School Curriculum by William J. Tastle et al. Nevertheless, it reached the same conclusion. The US education system, suggest the writers, is failing to provide people with the right IT and IS skills for the business marketplace (something UK skills campaigners have been bemoaning for at least a decade).

The article included the comments: "The long-term future for IS education seems bleak at best unless the IS curriculum is reoriented to address these critical issues that are also apparently neglected by some businesses, and our instruction is modified to make IS graduates more appealing and productive to business.

"Outsourcing of IT functions is not a new reality for many organizations in the United States. However, what originated as a domestic approach to business management has increasingly been refocused to explore the cost savings in outsourcing overseas."

While it is hard to consider comments about unskilled America too seriously in the context of the global dominance of such companies as IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, EDS, HP, and dozens of others, they unfortunately coincide with an increasingly isolationist and sometimes xenophobic debate in the US about offshoring. That debate is propelled to some degree by its selective and emotive use as a tick-in-the-box vote grabber by presidential candidates.

Candidates who have raised the issue of US jobs being lost to India and other countries neglect to mention the ways in which outsourcing benefits the US, especially given that the US is itself one of the world's leading providers of outsourced services. It is the world's leading hardware and software developer, and certainly the Moby Dick of intellectual property.

A report this week finds that the US remains the third outsourcing destination of choice for UK CIOs, for example. Many of America's leading IT brands are globally successful partly because they outsource; outsourcing risk is the hidden driver of the US high-tech economy, some commentators believe.

Negative comments about outsourcing appear on numerous blogs. For example, news that Indian giant Tata had acquired iconic British car marques Land Rover and Jaguar (from US car maker Ford, let's not forget) was the trigger for some vitriolic comments on a thread at technocrat.net. This is a site affiliated with Bruce Perens, one of the prime movers of the open source software community and a passionate campaigner for free speech through open source technologies.

Xenophobic responses were swiftly taken down, and in its place remains a fascinating, if bleak insight into the psyche and worldview of some highly vocal sections of the IT community.

What the debate is really about is fear: fear of the decline of US economic power, characterised by the downward spiral of the dollar against other currencies.

The downturn is not the fault of India, China, or any 'emerging economy' – countries that offer vast potential markets and partnership opportunities for Western companies and governments, after all. Gordon Brown has been swift to recognise this fact. Rather, that decline is due in part to an insular political climate combined with the subprime mortgage collapse, and an economy based on the inflation of some companies' worth to investors over what they actually produce for the wider public.

Perhaps some of the most alarmist and xenophobic technology commentators in the blogosphere – who usually hide behind 'Anonymous Coward' postings – might like to consider whether they have become part of the problem, rather than resort to xenophobic slurs on forums that encourage political discourse.

Accenture has provided more evidence of the success of many outsourcing and services companies in the economic downturn. The company surprised many analysts by reporting higher than expected Q2 (ending 29 February) results, and accordingly increased its full-year earnings forecast.

Net income rose 37 percent to $406.6 million on revenues of 5.61 billion, from $296.7 million on revenues of $4.75 billion in the same period last year. Chief financial officer (CFO) Pamela Craig added that outsourcing revenues were at a record high of $2.26 billion, an increase of 18% in US dollars and 11% in local currency, she said.

Chairman and CEO William Green said: “Our continued focus on clients, on execution and on accountability serves us well. In today’s environment clients are looking for results, and this plays to our strength. We see a lot of opportunities for our services in the market, and we are laser focused on taking advantage of them.

Chief operating officer (COO) Stephen Rohleder said: “We’re extremely pleased that four of our five operating groups achieved strong revenue growth and also delivered strong operating margin.” Rohleder said that demand within the financial services sector remains strong, despite the global economic downturn. “We are seeing strong demand in financial services throughout Europe and increased demand in Asia Pacific, while North America is holding up well.

“Through long-term relationships with key clients, we are selling additional work and signing contract renewals and extensions. We’ve sharpened our offerings to target the C-suite issues of today including cost management and we are using outsourcing as a strategic tool to deliver improved business results.”

Another operating group doing well for Accenture is communications and high tech (CHT), which continues to show strong momentum, said Rohleder. “This was the third straight quarter in which CHT had double-digit revenue growth in both US dollars and in local currency. In communications, we are seeing significant demand in the customer service area, which has resulted in some recent big wins throughout Europe.”

Rohleder said that not all areas of the outsourcing business were faring as strongly as others, leading to lower revenues in one market sector. “The public service operating group had some challenges this quarter, with three percent revenue growth in US dollars and a decrease of one percent in local currency,” he said.

“This was primarily due to lower outsourcing revenues in the Americas. Q2 operating margin in public service was affected by delivery inefficiencies on a few contracts, as well as the investment we are making in building a strong pipeline of early stage opportunities. We are very focused on improving the growth and the operational performance in this business unit.”