We recently sat down with Brent Hoag, the CIO of Diversey, a worldwide, privately-held producer of cleaning solutions, which employs of 10,000 workers and generates over $3billion in sales annually, to talk about his experiences with IT outsourcing.
1. What kinds of IT services has Diversey chosen to outsource and why?
Diversey has a total outsourcing model for support services and project execution services. The best way to describe this is that there are no Diversey employees who touch any of our systems for support, development, configuration purposes.
2. As the use of alternative delivery methods, such as cloud and SaaS, increases, what kinds of adaptations have you made to evaluate the quality of service delivery?
Diversey is a proponent of alternative delivery models and an early adopter of SaaS and cloud technologies. We evaluate these services primarily based upon reliability, ease of migration/exit, productivity increases for users, sustainability, security.
3. What are a few of the key tools or resources you use to monitor the overall health of your sourcing services relationships?
Overall we continually evaluate service scope, service quality, service cost, risk, and the ability of the leadership team to match resources with our culture. From a measurement standpoint we measure and monitor all kinds of areas, mostly for trends, however the biggest success factor tends to be motivation of the outsourcing team which is largely driven by their ability to drive revenue and profit on the account. Therefore pay for performance is critical to get right.
As we have matured we have found ways to build innovation into our partnership and contracts, including joint planning on innovations that deliver results.
4. To what degree do you look to your outsourcing partners to delivery innovation – or is that still something that is intended to be derived from within?
Our first forays into outsourcing were largely focused on cost. In an environment of constant cost reduction, innovation is not able to survive. As we have matured we have found ways to build innovation into our partnership and contracts, including joint planning on innovations that deliver results. We still consider our internal team the drivers of iation ideas, however the execution is delivered through partners.
5. How important is it to you to have a Nearshore component to service delivery – can you give examples?
In our global environment nearshore is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We have not found that having external resources close to our customers is required, only language needs that may be sourced closely only due to available skill sets. We do source our internal relationship managers close to our key customers which we find to be a productive model.
Brent W. Hoag has served as Vice President & Chief Information Officer since December 2009. He was our Senior Director—Business Solutions from May 2008 until December 2009 and was our Director—IT Vendor Management Office from July 2006 until May 2008. He joined JohnsonDiversey in 2002 serving as our Director—JDEdwards Solution Center from September 2002 until July 2006. Mr. Hoag spent 13 years in the management consulting industry prior to joining JohnsonDiversey.
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