Had a discussion wtih Nipun Sehgal, founder and CEO of Enlighta, which sells software to manage and govern engagements — whether IT outsourcing, BPO or application change management. According to Mr. Sehgal, the software can be run by the service provider or the client and allows the users to monitor performance and track compliance through SLAs and other contractual terms.
As an example of usage, Mr. Sehgal, said, "Let’s say you’re a global manager and you’ve outsourced portions of your application development. Now you’re starting to look at your BPO services. Vendor governance teams — they call it different things — these groups need to manage the work. Fundamentally the functions are done through Excel, e-mail, spreadsheets. What’s missing — these five, seven, 20, 30 people in some cases, they need to have a suite of tools that enables them to get real-time insight into issues and disputes, into financials so they can reconcile what they’re being billed. Today there isn’t anything that does that. It's an emerging area. When we sell to customers, the value proposition is, you’re outsourcing $50 million worth of services and [you've] formed a 10-person team to govern. We empower your governance through truth."
According to Mr. Sehgal, users can perform compliance management by setting up the software to audit policies and track tasks; they can define their services catalog, then measure the performance of those delivered services; and they can create dashboards for the governance team to gain real-time access to the status of the work.
Enlighta's primary market has tended to be major service providers, who then resell the solution as part of their offerings. But anybody grappling to gain control of the spaghetti noodles of a major outsourcing project can apparently try out the software for 90 days for free. Enlighta will set up the pilot.
I'm doing a more extensive Q&A with Mr. Seghal on highly-effective governance. That will probably be published as an "Advice from the Experts" article when the site launches.
