Global Sourcing Blog

Moving work offshore: It’s more than just numbers

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:17:30 +0000

Some time ago I got a call from a client I met at a conference last fall. His company had been acquired and he was part of a sourcing strategy team charged with reducing internal IT headcount. As they were asked to meet a target number that seemed unrealistic, he wanted to know the average number of jobs that mature outsourcers transfer offshore.

What do we mean by “outsourcing maturity?”

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:52:07 +0000

A while back I read several research reports about the current and future state of IT outsourcing. Aside from uniformity of the predictions I was struck by how often the words “mature”, “maturity”, and “maturing” appeared. For example, “ADM outsourcing is entering a phase of relative maturity”, “the mature IT outsourcing market”, and “sourcing capabilities are maturing.”

Now it’s one thing to use “mature” to indicate experience. A couple of months ago I quoted a client who referred to himself and his peers “growing up” as sourcing practitioners. However, the word can also imply stasis, or as my dictionary defines it, “Having reached full natural growth or development.” I have a problem with applying this definition to the global sourcing market.

Welcome to the Global Sourcing Blog

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:47:07 +0000

Welcome to the newly launched Infosys Global Sourcing Blog. As online media has grown more personal, the services sourcing world has also become more global. Some of the drivers are similar in both cases: better technology, easier collaboration tools, disintermediation and more globalization. And the way they are consumed is similar too: co-existence with traditional models (newspapers and TV in the case of media; traditional sourcing models in case of services), modular (mash-ups and personalization; modular sourcing) and dependent on maturity levels (new adopters typically leapfrog old methods; also based on readiness and past experience). These are happy coincidences!

Infosys has kept pace with and, in many cases, led the pack in terms of defining the ‘art of the possible’ in the IT and BPO services industry. We pioneered the Global Delivery Model more than two decades ago and have leveraged the Global Sourcing inflection points during Y2K, 2001-02 recession.

Now, in the present uncertainty, we are expanding the frontier of what Global Sourcing can deliver. More services (SaaS, Platform BPO), higher value-add activities (R&D, Engineering), multiple locations (Eastern Europe, China, South America) and transformational solutions are all part of this evolution. We helped Thomas Friedman coin the term ‘Flat World’ and practice what we preach – we are a truly flat world company that is global, innovates continuously and is helping clients win in the turns.

This blog is dedicated to furthering the art and science of global sourcing through conversation, thought, debate, comment and observation. We encourage participation from well-intentioned contributors to help us make this a lively and growing forum for the global sourcing community. This blog is not about Infosys – it is about you, the global sourcing practitioner, the visionary, the beneficiary, and other affected parties. We would like to welcome all shades of opinion and, in the process, demystify the concept and practice of Global Sourcing for all of us!

Happy blogging in the Globally Sourced Flat World…