Welcome
Welcome to the Foresight Newsletter, a free monthly publication of Prevoyance Group Inc. This newsletter shares tips for high performance IT organizations and observations that we hope will prove informative and enjoyable.
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Contents
Foresight is published by the Prevoyance Group, and this month contains four sections:
Work
Life
Heard in the Hallways
Travels with Patrick
Work
One of the most effective ways to silence a large room of people in a corporate setting is to mention the “Big O:” Outsourcing. Women cover the ears of any nearby children, and grown men begin to weep.
While this may be a bit of an overstatement, mention of outsourcing conjures images of all the associated baggage: globalization and off shoring, cost cutting and the staff trimmings that often accompany any talk of outsourcing. Aside from the usual direct cost savings associated with outsourcing, has it been given an unfairly bad rap?
To make outsourcing work, there are generally two critical elements. The first is choosing an appropriate outsourcing partner. This partner needs to have a firm understanding of your business, and how the process they are assuming control over fit within that business. In addition, they must guarantee certain service levels and quality standards in order to be effective. The myriad criteria that go into choosing a quality partner is beyond the scope of this article, but the second critical factor deserves attention as well.
Outsourcing should only be considered for non-critical processes that are ancillary to the main function of your business, or processes that are mundane and overly burdensome that do not directly impact the end customer. In consultant-speak, you should outsource “non-value added” processes. This can become counter intuitive until you realize that what is a critical process to one organization may be an ancillary process to another. For many years outsourcing call centers was the market trend, with massive call center operations being built from Wisconsin to Bangalore, and many organizations jumping on the outsourcing train. This came back to haunt several organizations where the call center was actually a critical component of their value-generation process. Outsourcing something as critical as outbound or inbound selling, or customer relations can create bad blood between your company and its customers, or worse yet, the outsourcing provider may not adequately represent your products or company to the customer, leaving money on the proverbial table. If the call center is ancillary to your business, by all means, consider outsourcing.
Outsourcing at its best should effectively eliminate the mundane aspects of your business, and free your attention, and the attention of other employees, to focus on generating value for the enterprise. If an outsourcing provider can take a mundane or burdensome task and effectively eliminate it as an area of ongoing concern, there is value beyond the mere cost savings. In an IT organization in particular, much of what occurs is relatively mundane. Keeping networks and systems operating is certainly business critical, but should that be the primary focus of a C-level executive? Are there more pressing and strategic matters, which you would focus on “if only” you did not have to fight fires and deal with the mundane?
Another compelling aspect of outsourcing is that it need not involve handing off responsibility to an external provider. When pondering those activities that are preventing you from focusing on the strategic aspects of your business, consider “insourcing” those activities to a trusted manager, providing them with a budget for their management, and a set of service level and quality standards just as you would an external provider. If you truly allow this person the freedom to manage their component of the business, and treat the relationship as “hands off,” the arrangement allows for both talent development inside the organization, and the ability to free yourself to focus on generating business value, rather than fighting the latest fire.
Life
In the so-called “service economy,” we are often encouraged to specialize, becoming the most knowledgeable and skilled person in the most esoteric and narrow niche that we can find, the assumption being that your knowledge will be so vast, and your area so unique, that your skills will be nearly impossible to duplicate. From the expert in repairing 1964-1968 MG transmissions to Zimbabwean currency speculation, a generation has defined its careers and perhaps its very existence on mastering a narrow slice of life.
I personally advocate the opposite. Too much specialization in a particular area becomes an “arms race” of sorts, your area of expertise constantly under threat by those seeking to learn an even more recondite aspect of your field. Sharpening your ability to learn, and quickly grasp new concepts and bodies of knowledge both increases your skills at cocktail party conversation, and allows you to perceive and learn new trends before the specialists have time to crawl out of their niche. Not only can you change with society, rather than attempting to burry yourself deeper in your specialty, but you will be able to relate to ever larger groups of people, a critical skill as we transition from a localized economy to a global one.
Heard in the Hallways
Most of us, me included, gain a certain guilty pleasure in participating in office gossip. From rumors of whether the new “trend du jour” unveiled by the CEO will actually gain acceptance, to speculation that the steely-eyed security guard may have a checkered past, there is some element of schoolyard-style pleasure in whispering the latest rumor to a trusted colleague, while adding your own conjectures to further color the rumor.
While these hallway whispers are the bane of HR executives everywhere, assuming they do not degrade into personal attacks, the rumor mill can be an indicator of which policies or corporate changes are causing the most consternation among employees. As long as the rumor mill does not become the de facto source of truth, learn to “tap in” to its rumblings without slinging any mud that you would not openly tell to the “victim” in person. If rumors are vastly different from actual corporate policies, there is a gap in either perception or execution that should be addressed.
Travels with Patrick
One of my fond memories as a child was a trip to an amusement park that presented an “evolution of technology” of sorts. I was about six years old, fascinated by anything mechanical or electronic, and the PC revolution was just on the horizon. The ride depicted communications evolving from hieroglyphics to fiber optics, and the highlight of the ride was a “living room of tomorrow.”
A booming and very sober voice described how we would easily be able to communicate with each other through voice and video, anywhere in the world. It then talked about how robots would do all our mundane chores, and technology would be so advanced and so automated, that we would be able to do a “normal” day’s work in mere minutes, freeing up most of the day for leisure. The animatrons had broad grins, liberated by technology to enjoy a life of leisure. I’ve always wanted to find the person that designed that ride, and ask him where we went wrong. While the ubiquitous communications came through, and I now have a Roomba robotic vacuum that handles our living room, I have yet to receive the check to cover all the increases in productivity over 1970’s levels that were supposed to go straight to leisure time!