Don’t know if you saw the January 29, 2006 article in The Wall Street Journal that featured Unisys’ Joe Hogan sharing advice about why outsourcing doesn’t often save as much as it could. I’m not going to link to it because you need to be a subscriber to read the content.
But I will provide this free advice from Joe, which his company published in a recent press release, because it’s short and true:
Unisys Strategic Outsourcing VP Joe Hogan believes there are three simple reasons for the complications that can arise in outsourcing projects:
- Failure to predict change
- Misaligned expectations (and a breakdown in trust between the client and outsourcing provider)
- Hidden costs
However, Hogan says there are ways in which companies can avoid those disappointments. For starters, CIOs must carefully choose their outsourcing provider to ensure that there’s a cultural fit – after all, outsourcing involves people working together toward a common objective, and they need to be compatible. The company must also clearly determine and articulate its goals for outsourcing, make sure that the service provider’s aims are synchronous, and create channels for continual communication throughout the life of the engagement.
CIOs can forestall problems even before selecting their preferred outsourcing provider by asking themselves several fundamental questions:
- Where do I want to be 3-5 years from now?
- What resources and capabilities do I need and how do I go about attaining them?
- How do I measure success and communicate to my business clients and the outsourcer what is being achieved now and what I want to achieve in the long term?
By asking themselves these questions, CIOs can avoid surprises and unhappy endings.
I’m beginning to think that as outsourcing becomes a normal part of business, we’ll start being able to call on therapists who specialize in helping client and service provider "couples" work out their differences and understand each other’s communication styles.
