Monthly Archive:: September 2016

The Services Industry is Changing in Radical Ways

The times they are a changing, as the old Bob Dylan song said. In a recent post, I blogged about the dramatic changes we’ll see in the services industry over the next two or three years. Let’s look at two more forces driving industry change. A major force is the maturity of the labor

How a PMO May Cause Your Transformation Initiative to Fail

Enterprises have undertaken transformation initiatives for decades, and there is a bevy of books, articles, white papers and consultants that tout how to ensure transformation success. One of the top best practices touted is to use a central Project Management Office (PMO) that takes responsibility for the transformation plan and holds the organization accountable

Forces Driving Change in the Services Industry

The outsourcing industry is at an inflexion point. It reminds me of Bob Dylan’s hit song from the 1960s, “The Times They are A-changing.” I believe the industry will undergo dramatic change over the next two to three years. Three forces are driving the change. The first is a shift in user and company

Analytics Pose Competitive Advantage Questions for Service Providers

Analytics technology is like a three-legged stool. Its rests on three necessary components: talent (data scientists, analysts and project managers), tools (from Excel all the way to Watson) and data. The most powerful is data. Data yielded in analytics are incredibly valuable in addressing business problems. As I recently explained, that value can be

How Can A CFO Become A More Strategic Business Partner?

Two years ago, I blogged about the switch from CIOs to CFOs as the new influencer in technology spend decisions. Fast forward to today, and there’s a lot of talk about how CFOs can become a more strategic partner to the business by adding more value. There are a couple of approaches that companies

Analytics Services – the X Factor

Just a little over a year ago, I predicted that the analytics services market was maturing quickly. I pointed out that it was moving beyond the early “gold rush” stage and becoming core or necessary to customers’ businesses and competitive advantage. Today I characterize analytics as “the X factor” – something that has a

How to Determine Whether Automation is Worth the Cost

There is a lot of talk in the marketplace about the benefits of automation. Even so, people ask Everest Group whether automation is worth the journey. Essentially, they want to know if, after having gone through the cost and effort of automating and deploying a robotic or cognitive agent they will have saved enough