Outsourcing
Gartner, 3/12/04: How to Decide if You Should Outsource Your Communications
Large organizations should consider outsourcing all their voice, data and mobile communications on a regional or global basis. Gartner looks at the pros and cons of doing this and finds that it calls for tight controls.
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Forrestor, 3/10/04: IT Consulting And Integration Services Continue To Commoditize
Firms want providers to deliver expertise at low cost. And there’s no differentiation among client experience. In fact, all of the major providers Forrester asked about rated a 3 on a 4-point scale for client satisfaction — demonstrating continued commoditization of services. But as demand for niche services picks up, big players won’t be able to take advantage.
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Gartner, 2/9/04: Midsize Business Applications Outsourcing User Wants and Needs
Midsize businesses (MSBs) often cite fear of losing control when considering whether outsourcing is the right choice, and the first steps toward outsourcing usually involve non-core infrastructure services, including networks, server and Web hosting, desktop outsourcing and help desk capabilities. However, some have chosen to move up the value chain from infrastructure into the applications stack when it comes to outsourcing. Gartner Dataquest explores the requirements that enterprises of 100 to 999 employees have for applications outsourcing (AO). It shows that AO is an ad hoc decision focused on backoffice applications, often handled by IT-manager-level individuals.
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Gartner, 3/10/04: Forecast for IT Outsourcing Segments Shows Strong Growth
Greater granularity is now available in the Gartner Dataquest IT outsourcing (ITO) forecast through a segmentation of the forecast into four major components: enterprise applications, data center, desktop and network. This segmented view is critical for insight into today's outsourcing market, a buyer's market that is driving toward increasingly selective, multisourced and flexible contracting practices.
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Forrestor, 3/12/04: Who’s Buying Process Transformation
Clients will continue to buy business process transformation services this year, and many will do business process management (BPM) and compliance projects, too. When hiring consultants to help, buyers need to look at the consultants’ latest investments in business process thinking and their expertise with pure-play BPM tools.
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Helpdesk
Forrestor, 3/11/04: Help Desk Outsourcing Pricing Practices
The desire to cut costs is a significant driver for outsourcing the technical help desk, as is the need for improved service through extended support and predictable service levels. Help desk outsourcing is increasingly being commoditized because of the standardization of service offerings, competition among vendors, and the introduction of advanced technologies. Furthermore, benchmarking exercises within the enterprise are allowing organizations to establish whether internal services are candidates for outsourcing. However, help desk pricing is a complex issue and certainly does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all model. Organizations are required to review geographic location, hours of coverage, pricing method, service level, length of agreement, and scope of service before making a decision on outsourcing.
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Customer Satisfaction
Forrestor, 3/15/04: The Balanced Scorecard For IT: User Metrics
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) has gained significant traction within our client companies as IT organizations successfully use the BSC as a measurement and management tool to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their operations as well as to communicate the value of IT throughout the enterprise. The IT value (financial) metrics are similar across most companies; however, the user perspective represents a key opportunity for the IT organization to differentiate itself. By placing the user at the heart of the IT strategy and clearly articulating the value proposition it delivers, IT can begin the process of establishing competency and credibility. When developing the user metrics, management needs to push beyond the usual user satisfaction survey. User metrics should be developed across four categories including: 1) user satisfaction; 2) IT/business unit partnership; 3) applications delivery; and 4) service delivery. In partnership with their users, these metrics will significantly increase their probability of a successful BSC implementation.
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Offshoring
ZDnet, 3/18/04: Tech professionals group wary of offshoring
By Ed Frauenheim
A major association of technical professionals believes that the outsourcing of high-wage jobs to low-wage countries poses a serious, long-term challenge to the United States' technological leadership, economic vitality and military security.
IEEE-USA, the U.S. wing of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, said Thursday that the "offshoring" trend also contributes to high unemployment among U.S. techies.
"We must develop a coordinated national strategy to maintain U.S. technological leadership and promote job growth in the United States," IEEE-USA President John Steadman said in a statement. "But it's going to be difficult to remain technologically competitive, if we continue offshoring the jobs of our innovators at rates currently projected."
In a policy statement, IEEE-USA said U.S. government procurement rules should favor work done in the country and should "restrict the offshoring of work in any instance where there is not a clear long-term economic benefit to the nation or where the work supports technologies that are critical to our national economic or military security."
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Security
Computerworld, 3/18/04: Microsoft aims to save users from themselves in XP update
The final Windows XP Service Pack 2 is due out by midyear
News Story by Gillian Law
Most security issues and virus outbreaks happen because people don't know how to protect themselves or don't bother to do what they know they should. In the latest update to Windows XP, Microsoft Corp. has focused on helping people become more aware of what they need to do and encouraging them to actually do it, Ryan Burkhardt, lead program manager for Service Pack 2, said today.
A new test version of SP2, called Release Candidate 1, was made available to beta testers yesterday, and the completed update will be released by midyear, Burkhardt said.
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Collaborative Technologies
C|net, 3/29/04: Information overload and its discontentss
By Charles Cooper
Ask 100 people in Silicon Valley whether technology will revolutionize the way we work in the year 2014, and you'll find that most folks are true believers.
The available statistical evidence seemingly makes a strong case. U.S. labor productivity soared from 1995 through the first three quarters of 2002 precisely because of a major investment in information technology. And despite expectations of a slight falloff in the years ahead, productivity growth is still expected to continue to range between 2 percent and 2.8 percent for the foreseeable future, according to a recent study from think tank Rand.
But is IT really up to the task?
Easily overlooked is the fact that the boom was a one-off event. The unique combination of the Year 2000 bug buildup, the Internet explosion and the telecommunications bubble is not likely to repeat during our lifetime.
I still don't know half of the things I might do with Microsoft Word--even after using the product nearly every workday. But who has the time? Maybe I'm the dopey exception, but it seems to me that lots of other people are also on the edge of information overload.
"That's not the right way to look at it," says Sheldon Laube, the director of information and technology at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Laube, one of the first big corporate IT users to recognize the potential of Lotus Notes, argues that users and suppliers have fed off each other during the product creation cycle to create what we ask for.
"Vendors are adding new features to products, because users have increasing and diverse demands," he says. "The number of people using Microsoft Word is in the tens (of) millions. Across those millions of people, different functions may be getting used. The tough part is adding more functionality without also adding more complexity.
It's great to have more functionality over time. The challenge is to make the technology more accessible to people."
"The one thing that made (Lotus) Notes attractive was the simple idea that everybody could be a database designer," Laube recalls. "Any schnook could do it--and that, for me, was unbelievably powerful."
Then, three years ago, when Laube downloaded a new copy of Notes, "it was so complex, I couldn't figure it out."
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Optimism
Gartner, 3/16/04: 1Q04 Economic Scenarios: Global Recovery Still on Track
Gartner Dataquest is updating the economic scenarios we published in December 2003 (see "4Q03 Economic Scenarios: Expect Improvement but Stay Watchful," HARD-WW-DP-0601). Although recent economic developments dictate a change in the details of our scenarios, we see no reason to change our fundamental view of global economic prospects. The global economy will most likely experience a marked U.S.-led recovery that will stimulate global IT spending with a relatively short lag (0.7 probability). Nonetheless, other outcomes are possible. The possibility that the budding global recovery may stumble if the U.S. economy fizzles on account of weak employment growth and loss of confidence in the dollar remains significant. The global economy could also experience a stronger and more-broad-based economic recovery, characterized by more robust and synchronous IT spending, if the dollar maintains an orderly descent and China sustains its impressive growth. In a change from December, the probabilities of these alternatives are about equal (0.15 probability for each).
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Otherwise
Release 1.0, 2/18/04: Software on the Brain
This issue of Release 1.0, in turn, covers the brain and software from a more tech-business point of view, illustrating the impact our increasing understanding of the brain has had on improving the power and accessibility of end-user software.
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