By: Linda Tuck Chapman
Developing and implementing consistent, actionable performance metrics for your Application Development and Maintenance and Testing program is one of the best ways to ensure you get value for money. One of the most important aspects of developing effective metrics is to resist measuring everything that can be measured. Focus only on measuring what matters.
The consensus from NSAM's readers: Wait for the Castros to move on before taking Cuba seriously.
By Jon Tonti
A mere 230 miles from Miami, Havana’s ultra-attractive geographic positioning continues to push Cuba on to the radar of ‘what ifs’ when looking at explosive possibilities in the Nearshore services sector.
But before floating into dream land – let’s review the facts: Cuba’s BPO market today is nearly non-existent and the Cuban government is not focused on jump-starting it. Despite an intelligent workforce that is increasingly exposed to private-run business, Cuba still has a long way to go to become viable for global services. We drew upon our pool of experts and did some poking around of our own to find that Cuba lacks a BPO scene because of the Cuban government’s preference for other industries, a weak technological infrastructure, a dearth of transparency, and political and workforce uncertainty.
Managing Outsourcers: When SLAs Don’t Do the Job
May 1st, 2012By Robert L. Scheier
Service level agreements (SLAs) are the heart and soul of many outsourcing contracts. They define what the provider must deliver and their penalties for failure, in anything from application uptime to the time required to solve a customer’s problem on a help line.
But at least as currently defined, SLAs often fall short of detecting (and, more importantly, correcting) problems quickly. That was the message at the recent SIG Spring Summit from Senior Corporate Counsel Richard English of Ingram Micro and Shaalu Mehra of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, who helps the electronic distributor negotiate outsourcing deals.
First CEO Summit of the Americas Yields Ideas…But Results?
April 26th, 2012Opportunities to deepen ties ranging from trade and investments to education and security
The First CEO Summit of the Americas wrapped up on April 14, 2012 with calls for greater cooperation among Western Hemisphere nations on matters ranging from trade and investment to education, science and technology and security, in order to boost prosperity from Canada to Chile.
At the end of the conference, held ahead of the 6th Summit of the Americas, Presidents Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Barack Obama of the United States participated in a roundtable discussion in front of an audience that included more than 700 top executives from many of the Western Hemisphere’s leading companies.
After praising the economic and social progress achieved by countries such as Brazil and Colombia over the past decade, Obama said there were many fields where countries in this hemisphere could collaborate fruitfully. “We’ve never felt …
By Kenneth Hess
No one wants for a relationship to fail but sometimes you have to quit on one that isn’t working. How do you know when to say, “When?”
Relationships are difficult. Band members have creative differences, teammates have ego problems and marriage partners have irreconcilable differences. Likewise, vendors and clients in business-to-business relationships experience all of the pains of band members, teammates and marriage partners. Maintaining a positive relationship is challenging when everything goes well but adding in technological differences, language barriers and time zone disparities has the effect of widening the gap between client and vendor.
New Survey Claims US Clients Prefer Farshore to Nearshore
April 10th, 2012By Robert L. Scheier
A recent study out of Duke University shows that American companies still prefer India, China and the Philippines to the Latin American Nearshore for IT infrastructure and application development and maintenance (ADM). The percentage of finance and accounting work done in Latin America rose from 10 percent in 2009 to 16 percent in 2011, with application development and maintenance (ADM) work rising from seven to 12 percent in the same period, according to the International Offshoring Research Network Project at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
By Heather Littlejohns
Companies seeking to locate new outsourced or shared services centers to offshore or near shore locations typically focus their exploration on factors such as price, local government support and incentives, cultural affinity with the target market, unemployment rates, labor pool, language skills, etc. But are companies really taking the necessary time to explore, assess and discuss their own points of differentiation as they are perceived by the local population?
US and Europe to Lose Millions of Business Services Jobs as Part of “Natural Evolution” of Globalization
April 4th, 2012By Jon Tonti
Of the 8.2 million business services jobs held domestically at the beginning of 2002 in some 4,700 companies based in North America and Europe only 4.5 million will remain in their domestic markets by 2016 according to a study by The Hackett Group, a management consulting firm. The same study finds that the amount of business services work moving offshore will “level off significantly” during the next few years due to changes in the conditions of offshore drivers.
Customers Make Clear that Outsourcing is About Adding Value
April 4th, 2012
By Robert L. Scheier
As the global economy improves, customers are looking to outsourcers to not only save money, but to drive growth, improve quality and drive innovation.
Those were among the key themes from two days prowling the corridors and break-outs at the Sourcing Interest Group (SIG) spring summit. Speaker after speaker, whether the topic was procurement, category management or macroeconomic trends, described how their employers are trying to use outsourcers not “just” to save money but to make a more strategic contribution.
Laurus International Opens State-of-the-Art Contact Center in DR
April 3rd, 2012“Laurus International is the first call center opened by the President of the Dominican Republic and it is an honor to welcome Dr. Leonel Fernandez, to our building today” commented Rudy Ganna, President and CEO of Laurus International, when the company inaugurated its state‐of‐the‐art call center facility in downtown Santo Domingo at the end of March. “We are eager to show our facilities, which features technology, security, productivity tools and employee amenities never before implemented in the call center industry. We also want to highlight our longstanding and deep commitment to expanding trade in the DR and creating careers for Dominicans that provide the highest level of comfort and care to our employees,” concluded Ganna.
The opening of its latest facility is part of a three year expansion plan in the DR to serve its rapidly growing demand for nearshore contact center and BPO services. Laurus International was founded in 2007 …
