Outsourcing
Forrestor, 3/22/04: Checklist For Help Desk Outsourcing
Structuring The Decision
by Robert McNeill and John Ragsdale
Prior to issuing a request for proposal (RFP) from help desk outsourcers, organizations should invest in a structured discovery exercise of help desk operations and how this group is perceived by the business. Four key areas need to be analyzed: a detailed analysis of help desk technology, an IT asset inventory, responsibilities of help desk and asset management staff, and customer satisfaction metrics. With this information, IT management can make a sound analysis of the effects of help desk outsourcing regarding cost, customer satisfaction, and organizational flexibility.
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Forrestor, 3/19/04: Outsourcing IMAC
by Robert McNeill
with Christine Ferrusi Ross, Adam Brown
Install, move, add, and change (IMAC) activities are an integral part of any IT organization’s asset and service management initiatives. Many organizations are under pressure to outsource elements of desktop, LAN, and infrastructure operations, and change management activities are most often bundled into these engagements. To reduce the cost of change management, particularly in the distributed enterprise, clients need to hire outsourcers that are investing heavily in automation, have integrated process architectures for IMAC, and provide end user SLAs to the business. These efforts will not only reduce cost but also align spend with line-of-business demands.
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Forrestor, 3/19/04: Staffing Requirements For The Offshore Program Management Office
by Stephanie Moore
with John McCarthy, William Martorelli
Companies, particularly those in the financial services sector, are rapidly increasing their offshore outsourcing efforts. Although many of these firms have been experimenting with offshore outsourcing for several months or years, they now are under pressure to more fully exploit the business value and cost savings that offshore IT relationships offer. One of the challenges these firms face is how to implement or augment a program management structure to accommodate the increased activity and governance requirements. As companies’ offshore outsourcing activities grow, the program management office must keep pace.
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Forrestor, 3/22/04: Statements Of Work: What You Need To Know
by Stephanie Moore
with Adam Brown
As companies increase IT services consumption, they often seek to improve their outsourcing and vendor management processes. Many companies struggle with how to communicate and formalize work requests with their IT services vendors. While most companies have a master services agreement (MSA) with their IT services vendors, they aren’t always as rigorous with statements of work. Clients that have struggled to perfect statement of work processes and documents — which results in disputes with vendors about deliverables, pricing, and scope creep — should create a detailed, yet simple, statement of work (SOW) that will put an end to such disputes.
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Forrestor, 3/19/04: Dell Outsourcing Services Win In The Midmarket
by Robert McNeill, Julie Giera
With Frank Gillett, Adam Brown
Desktop outsourcing prices are at the lowest levels in history, having fallen approximately 20% in the past 18 to 24 months. Dell has been the driving force behind this phenomenon. In 2004, Dell Services will increase market share in the midmarket (1,000 to 4,000 seats) with services based on its own product set, hardware price advantages, and a highly automated, flexible, partner-driven services strategy. At the same time, the midmarket is selectively outsourcing their desktop operations, aligning nicely with Dell’s services portfolio. Dell may not have nearly as much success against IBM Global Services and HP Services in the Global 1,000 in the next 12 to 18 months. For Dell to improve its position in the changing Global 1,000 market, it must offer broader, more complete outsourcing services, improve its ability to manage multivendor platforms on a global scale, and move to a more relationship-ased, high-touch services mindset.
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Offshoring
C|net, 3/23/04: What to do about outsourcing
By Paul Lamb
Now that election battle lines are drawn, and outsourcing has become a debate issue, do we simply pick a side? Why not offer some solutions, instead?
Insourcing and Cross-sourcing
Despite the Internet-enabled traveling nature of service jobs like computer programming, many jobs require workers on the ground--even in the information technology business. For example, my own organization recently launched a computer repair and desktop and networking support business that hires and trains local low-income or unemployed workers. We already know that we have an outdated elementary and secondary educational system that's ill-equipped to serve the future.
The trick is to determine what local needs can only be served by the local employable population and then build businesses and training solutions around those needs.
We must clearly identify what future businesses cannot "travel" and target education and training programs toward specific "insourcing" opportunities.
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The Washington Post, 3/24/04: Tech Group: Outsourcing Fears Overblown
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Concern that American jobs are being sent abroad represents "hysteria," the largest U.S. technology trade group said on Tuesday, as it called for new education and immigration policies to boost employment.
"In today's hysteria over offshore outsourcing, productivity has become a four-letter word," said the Washington, D.C.-based American Electronics Association, whose member companies, numbering more than 3,000, employ 1.8 million people.
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Future Focus
Forrestor, 3/19/04: The Future Of Software Pricing
by Nicholas Wilkoff
Today’s software buyers must consider a wide assortment of pricing models, typically characterized by large, upfront costs. But market trends like open source and server virtualization put pressure on many of these traditional pricing models. One model gaining attention is utility pricing, defined as pay-as-you-go pricing based on a fixed or variable metric. This model provides a lower entry cost for buyers and a more predictable revenue stream for vendors, but the barriers to adoption are still intimidating. So when does utility pricing make sense? Forrester expects utility pricing to become a viable model as service-based software evolves. This evolution will span the decade, gaining traction first with hosted service offerings beginning in 2005, and then locking onto the maturation of utility computing and composite applications in 2007 to 2010. Even in a service-based world, users must still determine if utility pricing is a good fit, based on the predictability of usage and the ability to map software transactions to business value.
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Microsoft
C|net, 3/24/04: EU slaps record fine on Microsoft
By Michael Parsons
The European Union on Wednesday issued its ruling in the long-running case against Microsoft, fining the American software giant $613 million, the heaviest punishment in any European competition case to date.
European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti ruled that Microsoft had failed to provide to rivals information that they needed to compete fairly in the market for server software. He also ruled that the company has been offering Windows on the condition that it come bundled with the Windows Media Player, and thus was stifling competition in the market for media player software.
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