What Are The Biggest Trends in Outsourcing Today?

A recent Raconteur report explored some of the key trends driving outsourcing today. The six key trends identified are:

1. BPM not BPO; Business Process Management means taking over entire services for clients and working as partners, not like a supplier.
2. New Frontiers; many new markets are offering services, particularly in African countries that have not engaged much with global IT in the past.
3. Local Government; a wave of global austerity is forcing governments globally to explore outsourcing.
4. Changing Contracts; the long-term 20-year deals are over.
5. Cyber Security; Companies need more help than ever protecting their information and their supply chain.
6. Transformation; more than ever, outsourcing is being used to completely change companies and to help them explore new business models.

These are good observations, although it is not mentioned that both IT outsourcing and Business Process Outsourcing have been dramatically changed by innovations such as cloud based services and the app store culture. Delivering IT services today is far closer to offering products to customers than it used to be – bespoke development still exists, but is far less common.

However, the problem I really have with the six trends is that the report appears to give them equal weight. They are all listed with an appearance of the same importance, whereas I believe that the first point is entirely reshaping the outsourcing market.

Many technology services are so complex today that large companies will almost certainly not have expertise in-house. Think about complex Big Data analysis as a good example. Designing and building the database systems is hard enough, but to make sense of it you need data scientists. Most companies don’t have any of these skills just sitting around waiting to be used.

The Customer Service marketplace is another good example. Customer Service used to mean managing a contact centre. It was quite a dull and repetitive process and could easily be managed in-house or could be outsourced to a service provider that could provide the service at a lower cost. Now there is an enormous amount of technology involved in managing customer relationships – ERP for supply chains, CRM for managing interactions, Big Data for analysing trends and social interactions. Managing customer relationships now is far too complex for almost any company – other than the biggest – to handle without going to an expert.

Outsourcing is becoming an essential strategy for this reason. Companies need to hire expertise. These clients really need the expertise of the supplier to help build their strategy. The days of lining up three similar suppliers and then asking which one will offer a service at the lowest price are largely over. Supplier relationships now are far closer to partnerships where both companies want the business to succeed.

We all know this from our personal life. You know that there might be a cheaper plumber or a cheaper car insurance company out there, but you also know that if you go for the cheapest then the service will not be good. This thought process has now entered into the enterprise outsourcing space. In fact, the term outsourcing no longer really reflects the partnership nature of these corporate relationships today.

Perhaps it’s time to say that outsourcing is dead, but partnership is alive and well?