have<\/em> to. \u00a0And BPO is just one of lever of several levers for COOs to pull these days, as this quest gathers steam.<\/p>\nHence transactional\/operational labor costs are the new no-no – and if you’re in IT or business operations today and merely doing operational work, there’s a strong chance, over the next 2-3 years you will be:-<\/p>\n
a) Replaced with a SaaS app;<\/p>\n
b) Outsourced;<\/p>\n
c) Robotized; \u00a0or simply…<\/p>\n
d) Fired.<\/p>\n
So that means many IT\/ops staff may be forced out of their firms into manual jobs, or (if they’re lucky or smart enough) will shift to the “front office” where they interpret data, sell, market or strategize. \u00a0And many may opt to ply their trade with BPO providers.<\/p>\n
The biggest single problem facing the future of the white collar industry is what to do with all these “operational” people as they can’t all be reemployed as “value-add staff” – there won’t be as many vacancies to fill and many staff simply do not have the skills. \u00a0In short, we’re likely facing an employment crisis of unforeseen proportions, due to the sheer speed of automation and commoditization today – and this will especially affect the mid-career folks who have waited too long to re-skill themselves.<\/p>\n
The Bottom-line: \u00a0BPO is one of several levers for COOs to pull as they seek to refocus their internal talent on front office activities<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nIn short, providers can call “BPO” whatever they want. \u00a0In their eyes they are providing managed\u00a0expertise<\/em> – and the leaders like Accenture, Capgemini, Genpact, Infosys, HP et al. want more than just the BPO piece of the pie – they want the IT enablement, the end-to-end process… they want the operations<\/em> to run. \u00a0And the BPO opportunity is much more than simply taking on a few back end processes at lower cost – it’s about freeing up enterprises to focus on areas that are relevant to their growth and competitiveness. The better the providers get at delivering the standard BPO services, the greater the opportunity for them to take a bigger piece of the pie. \u00a0And this is eventually when BPO will fizzle away as part of a broader operational service that is being provided… but it’s not for a few years yet as the data above clearly tells us.<\/p>\nBut let’s not get caught up in terminology – the real issue is how ambitious enterprises are taking a much more mercenary approach to running their operations in today’s market – why add staff to support processes that are becoming obsolete? \u00a0In areas where common standards represent an acceptable level of performance, SaaS will rule – such as payroll, accounting, indirect procurement and so forth. You can buy your SaaS and be done with it. Smart firms “born in the cloud” are not looking to hire operators anymore, unless they absolutely have to. You can run a company off Legal Zoom, Intuit, Google etc with a small number of (or none at all) operators.<\/p>\n
However, in the areas where enterprises can still gain competitive advantage, namely where there is room for innovation, growth and productivity improvements, this is where companies will need help selling, marketing, strategizing, analyzing, designing etc. It is these people in the “front office” who need to lead the decisions on an operations backbone to support the business, but it’s how these operations and their supporting systems are configured to support business usability<\/em> that really matters.<\/p>\nThe core questions will be “how can I get the data I need to make this decision” and “how do I find the right supply chain partners to get my products to XYZ quickly” and “how do I find the right channels to promote my product” etc. Their systems need to support answers to business problems, not create more problems (like how do we get the stuff from Salesforce into that new analytics tool we bought and run a profit\/loss scenario in the accounts system etc).<\/p>\n
And the scary part that is coming, is if operational heads can’t design these operations and supporting systems effectively, their COO (or whomever) will cut a deal with a partner who can. There will be no room for prisoners any more.<\/p>\n
So when firms like Accenture drop the term “Outsourcing” and replace it with “Operations” they are really saying “stop trying to fix the little things, just hand it all over to us as you know you can’t run them effectively yourself”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I had a Bitcoin every time someone claimed that BPO is “dead” \/ “hitting the bottom” \/ “merely staff…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,50,51,835,62,63,78,79,80,81,838,836,90,91,831,832,830,97,837],"tags":[303],"organization":[],"ppma_author":[19],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-process-outsourcing-bpo","category-captives-and-shared-services-strategies","category-cloud-computing","category-f-a","category-gbs-2013-study","category-global-business-services","category-hfsresearch-com-homepage","category-hr-outsourcing","category-hr-strategy","category-it-outsourcing-it-services","category-kpo-analytics","category-procurement-engineering-supply-chain-outsourcing","category-robotic-process-automation","category-saas","category-smac-and-big-data","category-sourcing-best-practises","category-sourcing-change","category-talent-in-sourcing","category-the-industry-speaks","tag-enterprise-irregulars"],"yoast_head":"\n
BPO: Pronounced dead, but still very much alive - Horses for Sources | No Boundaries<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n