Thought Leadership Archive

The current way we buy complex services through a purchasing department is to come up with elaborate detailed requirements, which often can only be implemented over several years. We put these out to bid, forcing the vendor community to respond with far more detail and waterfall project plans laying out in excruciating detail how

I recently went to dinner with a CIO who talked about having two major service providers in his company’s portfolio – an Indian provider and Accenture. He told me he uses both providers aggressively. We were talking about the fact that both providers have similar rate cards, large numbers of offshore workers, and they

There’s no silver bullet for driving change; it’s a challenge in any organization and services providers and their clients struggle with this. In working with providers and buyers on transformation deals over the years, I observed the need for breakthrough metrics to drive the change through the buyer’s organization. As I mentioned in my

For large transformation projects, the services world has locked itself into a world permeated with high dead deal costs, wasted solutioning, and long transitions of nine to 18 months where the client sees low value and tries to get the provider to absorb the cost as well as expensive consultants and legal fees for

Much of the industrial arbitrage industry is based on developing tight and clear SOPs (standard operating procedure) for work, putting it into large factories in India where very bright people are asked to operate with tightly defined parameters and conform to them very rigorously and then go home. Unfortunately, in doing so, we inadvertently

The pace of new technology is advancing exponentially. But organizations change so slowly. This is particularly frustrating if you’re a senior executive who sees the opportunity to drive efficiencies or value and by making big changes in your organization, yet you find it’s painful and difficult to drive change and you can only make

Service Delivery Automation (SDA) encompasses cognitive computing as well as RPA (robotic process automation). Software providers that provide SDA come to market with an enterprise licensing structure that basically requires the customer to license a number of agents for a specific length of time. But in using this licensing model, service providers unintentionally constrain

Businesses now demand that IT departments dramatically change the velocity of the cycle time it takes to take ideas from concept to production – often from as long as 12-18 months to only four to six weeks. Organizations can’t achieve a change of this magnitude with just a change in methodology. To do this, they

Automation has the essentials for introducing different kinds of business risks and risk at a different order of magnitude. The new risks manifest differently and have greater consequences than in a normal business process. The issue is the difference between type 1 and type 2 errors. Type 1 error. This is a normal error

There’s an old joke that asks how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is it doesn’t matter; the light bulb has to want to change. I think this has a deep truth when applied to the services market. Almost every service provider looking for growth sees that capturing a