Outsourcing
Baseline, 4/1/04: Offshore Opt-Out
By Larry Dignan
Giving customers a choice of where in the world to send work will require more-flexible outsourcing deals.
When online lender E-Loan Inc. said it would use processing agents in both India and the United States, it may have signaled a need to disclose how its work is managed.
Pleasanton, Calif.-based E-Loan last month launched a pilot program for its home-equity-line customers, allowing them to choose whether they want to send work to India via outsourcing firm Wipro or keep the work in the U.S. If the work is sent offshore, E-Loan shaves two days of processing time compared to the 12-day U.S. process. Call-center workers, who need to handle the nuances of personal finance, remain in the U.S.
"Some companies are deceiving customers by pretending that offshore workers are on the West Coast," says E-Loan chief executive officer Christian A. Larsen. "I think you have to do offshore and you have to disclose it. Consumers can decide for themselves."
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Forrestor, 3/31/04: Assessing Your Offshore Outsourcing Readiness
Not All Organizations Have The Processes Or Culture To Move At The Same Pace
by William Martorelli and John C. McCarthy
with Adam Rown
Despite all the press and visibility, taking IT work offshore does not guarantee success or drive instant savings. Firms must understand that taking work to locations like India stress-tests their internal IT processes and challenges the company’s internal culture. The maturity of internal processes and culture will have more to do with success than the country or the vendor customers select. To help our clients understand their readiness for offshore outsourcing, we have devised a simple 20-question assessment that measures the suitability of a company’s existing IT processes and its overall cultural compatibility with the requirements of offshore outsourcing. Organizations with high readiness along these two vectors will be able to proceed more rapidly. Organizations with low readiness, conversely, must calibrate their expectations, tactics, time frames, and the selection of appropriate offshore suppliers in a manner commensurate with their readiness.
[more]
Computerworld, 4/1/04: ACS signs $219M outsourcing deal with McDonald's
Under the seven-year contract, ACS will run McDonald's IT infrastructure services
News Story by Linda Rosencrance
Affiliated Computer Services Inc. has inked a seven-year, $219 million deal to provide IT services to McDonald's Corp., according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Under the terms of the agreement, Dallas-based ACS will provide McDonald's with IT infrastructure services, including mainframe, enterprise servers, end-user computing and help desk support for more than 6,000 desktops.
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Call Center
Forrestor, 3/29/04: Extending Quality Initiatives Beyond The Contact Center
by John Ragsdale
Customer service managers have long been frustrated when held responsible for meeting service levels for customer requests handled by other departments, usually back-office staff. Witness Systems’ recent launch of eQuality Office extended its data capture, evaluation, and eLearning capabilities, which are used to monitor service agent productivity and identify processes in need of streamlining, to back-office applications. Contact centers using quality monitoring software to capture user data streams should identify processes performed outside of service that frequently cause missed service-level commitments and work with the business leaders who own those processes to leverage the data capture capabilities to identify root causes for delays. IT project leaders should also consider using this new take on quality monitoring (QM) when implementing enterprise software for training users on common process flows and to identify confusing or overly complex flows in need of refinement or simplification.
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IT Management
Forrestor, 3/31/04: EdgeSight Provides An Eye To End-User Systems
by Jean-Pierre Garbani
with Stephan Wenninger
Network endpoints and user workstations are usually not monitored, relying on the end user and a help desk to manage problems. In some environments, such as hospitals, the availability of self-service access is a critical issue that requires immediate intervention, but where users have rarely time to report failures. Even in these sensitive environments, traditional monitoring of user workstations has never been a real option, since it would rapidly overwhelm the network capacity. Reflectent Software has developed the EdgeSight program in an attempt to battle this problem and for users to have their cake and eat it, too.
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Forrestor, 3/31/04: Security Event Management Cures Data Deluge
by Steve Hunt
Intrusion detection system (IDS) products and many other systems on the network generate too many events to make sense of the output. Investments in IDS during the past five years left many customers suffering. Thousands of companies spent millions of dollars on IDS thinking they were making their security architectures stronger, only to find that IDS solved few problems and created many more.
While many organizations recognize the need to analyze myriad security-related events, they are hardpressed to do so in a cost-effective manner. Consequently, organizations must decide whether to outsource the event management to a managed security service provider or buy more technologies to extract some value from the investment they’ve already made. Security event management, the market niche describing these alternative technologies, offers a ray of hope to those organizations that may alleviate the problem by prioritizing their requirements and selecting at least one product to correlate, report, or view events.
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Security
Forrestor, 3/29/04: Forrester Wave™: XML Security Gateways
Growing Web services adoption is driving demand for secure Web services. XML security gateways offer a quick-hit solution — perfect for high-priority projects operating on a tight schedule. But it is critical to look at the early market in the broader context of application security architecture. Within three or four years, XML security gateways will disappear into firewalls and identity management. In the meantime, users can benefit from their integrated package of attack protection, trust enablement, and message processing acceleration. Forum Systems and DataPower Technology hold a slight edge, but others have unique value-add that may tip a buyer’s decision in their favor. Don’t be afraid to buy in, but start with a clear understanding of your application security requirements and architecture.
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HIPAA
Baseline, 4/1/04: HIPAA Insecurity
By Debbie Gage
If Chris DeVoney hustles, he can stay one step ahead of the hackers he fears are going to steal patient records. But he doesn't dare rest. He is the computing director at the clinical research center of the University of Washington Medical Center. In the past year, he has patched and installed software firewalls on 50 to 100 disparate medical devices—everything from computers to printers to FDA-approved devices that require bridging firewalls because no software can be loaded onto them.
Last month, he cleaned up after an attack by the Witty worm, which rewrote hard drives on 80 or so computers. The week before that, a notebook computer was hacked as it tracked data emanating from sensors attached to a subject who was sleeping as part of a research project. The campus had to "cut the hacker out" by turning off Internet access to the notebook so the study could be finished, says DeVoney.
The research center depends on the university's technology infrastructure, and government budget cycles make it hard for the university to buy what it needs when it's needed. Right now, for example, DeVoney has no perimeter firewall. Nevertheless, in April 2005, the Medical Center and thousands of other healthcare organizations will have to comply with regulations to protect the electronic security of patients' records—records that keep track of their physical or mental conditions, their treatments and their healthcare insurance and payments. Violations can incur civil penalties of up to $25,000 per infraction per year, and criminal penalties of up to $250,000 in fines and 10 years in prison. (Very small organizations have an extra year to comply).
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Microsoft
San José Mercury News, 4/2/04: Sun settles With Microsoft, cuts jobs
MAY WONG
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Struggling server maker Sun Microsystems Inc. reached a sweeping, $1.6 billion settlement with Microsoft Corp. and said Friday it plans to cooperate with its longtime nemesis, a company it had branded an unrepentant monopolist.
The surprise agreement was accompanied by Sun's announcement that it is cutting 3,300 jobs and that its net loss for the fiscal third quarter will be wider than expected. The cuts represent 9 percent of Sun's work force of more than 35,000.
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