Sourcing Shangri-La

The Patchwork Enterprise

The enterprise of the future looks something like patchwork.  In a good sense.  Patchwork quilts can be beautiful, blending diversity into a coherent whole - and uniquely distinctive. Often it’s collaboration by a group of quilters that creates them. And they’re not just great art. They keep you warm. They deliver.

Outsourcing is becoming ever more pervasive as globalization drives further specialization. In the villages of our forebears, people came to specialize in baking bread, or working with leather, or shodding plowhorses. In our global village too, it doesn't make sense to do in-house what someone else can do better or cheaper.

Outsourcing was once focussed on ‘non-core’ activities. Now everything – from R&D through manufacturing and supply chain to customer experience analytics – can be outsourced, and increasingly is.

In this patchwork future, successful enterprises will mirror the best quilting groups: a clear vision, creative collaboration and the means to make decisions. In other words, a well-defined operating model and a framework for effective collaboration that brings everyone's creativity into its execution. 

Patchwork has another, negative, connotation of course: ‘a hodge podge’. 

I worked with a multinational client once, leveraging Nimbus to bring multiple HR outsourcing contracts into one coherent whole. That end-to-end perspective exposed the multiple gaps between the expectations of the service providers and the retained organization. Non trivial gaps too.  One was an immediate threat to the entire expatriate payroll. 

That's the hodge podge kind of patchwork enterprise, and it has a very limited future. No-one’s going to want to work with, or buy from, a patchwork enterprise where the patterns and colors don’t match, and you can see the stitching - even worse, the gaps.

Some organizations are trying to stitch their multisourced reality together, buying in 'managed governance services' and the like from the Big 4.  But ultimately it demands holistic thinking, discipline and a platform to support it. Much like quilting.

 

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07 Jan 2013    Cloud Without Risk: Pie In The Sky

13 Dec 2012    The Universal Business Language: Process

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

Death of Outsourcing 'Greatly Exaggerated'

Oh dear. Things are looking a bit terminal for outsourcing.  The market-leading HfS blog, whose 80k subscribers are mostly sourcing professionals, sounded a death knell.  And now KMPG has published The Death of Outsourcing.

Mark Twain's celebrated remark on his premature obituary comes to mind. You don't have to look at IBM and Accenture for long to realise that this 'corpse' has rather a lot of vital signs.  Indeed, in many industries and activities - in clinicals trial and manufacturing in Life Sciences, for instance - outsourcing appears to be in the rudest of health.

So what's happening? Why this apparent gloom?

If you ask me, it's because things are changing fast. We're in an accelerating transformation towards the the virtual enterprise of the future.

And this sea change is most obvious in how the non-core activities of the enterprise - like procurement, accounting, HR and IT - are delivered. In KPMG's words:

"There is a revolution taking shape in the business services industry, one that disregards the traditional shared services and outsourcing paradigms.."   

It's not difficult to see why. The lion's share of the benefits of labor arbitrage and automation have been harvested. A recent Deloitte report, for example, concluded that the organizations which have been leaders in shared services and outsourcing 'are now struggling to capture the next generation of value... after picking the low-hanging fruit.'

So it may be the end of 'outsourcing as we know it'. But we can see the new paradigm rapidly emerging in the rise of 'global business services' (GBS) organizations - and they have flexible sourcing at their core.  Again, in KPMG's words [my italics]:

"Many of these new business services organizations share common traits. They are centrally managed, and usually have an integrated portfolio of capabilities - typically a combination of external service providers and internal shared services... [They] leverage a global pool of internal and outsourced resources to deliver a service that is nimble, aligned to the business, and connected with customers, employees and suppliers."

So reports of the death of outsourcing seem 'greatly exaggerated'.  In GBS and beyond, it's set to continue to grow. But it's going to be different - more complex, more dynamic, more multisourced - and will require new capabilities.

It's difficult to see how any GBS organization can deliver effectively without a world class business process management platform at its heart. It's the key to business alignment; to effective collaboration across organizational silos; to managing risk effectively; to delivering superior customer experience; and to sustainable improvement. 

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20 Jun 2012    Process - The Emerging Global Business Language

29 Feb 2012    Why Process Improvement Projects Fail

How Not To Implement Shared Services

A shared services center to deliver HR, finance, procurement, IT and other services for the UK's seven Research Councils. It seemed like a Good Idea when it was announced in 2006. 

Five years on, a review by the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) makes gloomy reading. Overspent £130m against a budget of £79m, and projected savings significantly less than expected. 

How did it happen? The NAO report highlights three fundamental flaws:

Lack of Clarity

"A key factor contributing to escalating costs was the early lack of clarity about how the service would operate. An outline design, known as a target operating model, was not agreed until August 2008, nearly a year after implementation had begun, but it was incomplete and lacked detail. Some elements of design were still ongoing during transition and system launch."

Confused Governance

"Early governance structures were complex. Reviews commissioned at various points during the project showed that responsibilities and accountabilities needed clarification."

Poor Management of Outsourcer

"A contract with Fujitsu to design and build the systems and ICT was "poorly managed".  It was eventually terminated at an additional cost of £13m."

Each of which could, of course, have been avoided, or at the very least mitigated, by the adoption of an appropriate process management platform.

No surprise that developing process maturity is an NAO theme - and runs through the NAO's recommendations in this case: to harmonise processes further, to strengthen end-to-end process management, and to embed continuous improvement.

Hear stories like this one, and other shockers in the Process Hall of Shame, and it's bewildering how organizations can still be in denial about the need for a process management platform at the heart of any shared services project.  As though it was a 'nice-to-have'.

Whereas actually it's the key to clarity at every level; to effective collaboration within a robust governance framework; to IT alignment; to drive process harmonization; to controlling a multisourced environment; to making life easier for the SSC workforce; and to enabling a culture of continuous improvement.

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07 Oct 2011    Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

19 May 2011    Service Integration and Process: In Six Minutes

 

Placing A Big Bet On Global Shared Services

"The companies you work for are placing a big bet on your success. Your job is to scale fast...". Deborah Kops's presentation captured the moment at this week's Finance Summit.

Shared services is set for very rapid growth. There is a convergence around an SSOS model of shared services implementation: Stabilize - Standardize - Optimize - Source. It's a model that's driving the expansion of shared services into global business services operations, delivering not just the traditional Finance & HR services but others such as Procurement and Supply Chain - and doing all this in an increasingly multisourced mix.

Unsurprisingly, change management featured heavily, reinforcing the importance of a service management framework. One organization reported 28 change initiatives running concurrently in its P2P process alone in this FY.

The challenges are changing as shared services moves up several gears, and beyond the easy wins in automation and labor arbitrage:

Customer Satisfaction. The pre-conference survey showed service improvement was on a par with continuing cost reduction. Several SSOs are using KPIs based on the Net Promoter methodology to measure client satisfaction.

Continuous Improvement. There's an new focus on continuous improvement programs. CI was one of the delegates' top budget priorities for 2012. 

Talent Management. There's a lot more focus on people, morale, motivation, engagement and retention. 

No surprise that there was a lot of interest in Nimbus Control as a service management framework that can orchestrate complex change and enable continuous improvement.  It was in the challenges of ERP projects that the visualization of process, in the language of the business, seemed especially powerful. Stakeholders in most organizations simply don't have proper visibility of the current and future state, can't do easy gap and impact analyses, and have no governance framework, beyond email, for managing change.

My conference highlight, by the way: sharing a table with a global P2P owner spending $52bn this FY. Awesome.

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11 Oct 2011    Continuous Improvement Made Easy

07 Oct 2011    Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

 

Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

Hats off to Accenture for bringing some reality and insights to the debate about what's holding back Shared Services. 

Everybody's doing shared services, everybody thinks it's strategic, yadda yadda yadda. The reality though is often disappointment and missed business cases.  Sustainable success in shared services is still the exception.

The Deloitte Shared Services survey, published in April, highlighted some lessons learned: the importance of governance, a collaborative framework, transparency and change management.   

Governance was also a theme running through the PwC/HfS report on Global Business Services, published in July: it has to be 'ongoing', 'well-integrated, consistent and rigorous' and not just another tool for vendor management.  

Those were useful contributions.  But Accenture's report this week Trends in Shared Services: Unlocking The Full Potential brings a new focus.  It spells out what the leaders are doing, and how they are succeeding. And process excellence is front and center.

Noting how one leader in shared services uses automation and metrics and process improvement specialists, it continues:  

"...while other elements are certainly in place - C-level support, comprehensive change management and a relentless focus on value - it is the organization's continued focus on process excellence that stands out ."

I share the report's enthusiasm that shared services will mature to become ubiquitous. And that we are witnessing the emergence of "a long-envisioned" model of integrated business services.  I agree too that 'managing multisourcing consistently' is a huge challenge for most organizations. And I'm delighted that Accenture highlights the vital need for a service management framework.   

But I have one quibble. Because even Accenture hasn't quite joined up the dots.

What is it, ultimately, that enables process excellence, that provides the collaborative framework for change management, that ensures transparency and IT alignment, that supports Lean and other continuous improvement programs, that provides the governance framework for the effective management of outsourcers, and that allows cloud and social media to be most effectively leveraged?  It's a business process management platform. 

It's not a panacea. It can seem a bit boring. It's an unspectacular answer when your SSC is 'in a complete mess'. But everything points to the business process management platform as the foundation for success in shared services.  It underpins process excellence. It's what enables the service management framework.  And it's the only way to optimize the management of process variants, which, the report notes, is the real problem in process standardization. 

What is the business process management platform that can do all this? I've defined it elsewhere as a platform that uses the universal language of end-to-end business process to enable four capabilities.  The only way I'd improve on that definition now, especially in the light of the Shared Services workshop in London last week, would be to re-iterate the importance of adoption.  If our brilliant process management models don't engage process stakeholders, and help real people to get real work done and to contribute to improving things , then we're missing the biggest trick of all.    

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03 Oct 2011    Shared Services at IP11: Your Top Issues

19 May 2011    Service Integration and Process: In Six Minutes

  

Shared Services @ #IP11: Your Top Issues

 
I hesitate to use the word 'landslide' but attendees at the Shared Services workshop at IP11 last week voted decisively on their own Top 3 issues (after strongly endorsing the issues identified by the Deloitte and PwC surveys earlier this year):

(1) Managing process variants

(2) Retaining IP and strategic control where activities are outsourced

(3) Building a continuous improvement culture.

Haha - no real surprises here for regular readers! For others new to this blog, there is more on variants here, on retaining IP and control in outsourcing here, and on continuous improvement here.

Slides from the workshop are available from the conference website. Thanks to all who contributed!

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20 Sep 2011    BPM: The Foundation Of Operational Excellence

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After Nimbus IP11, The Sky's The Limit

 
It seemed entirely appropriate that an extraordinary first day’s program at Nimbus IP11 closed out this evening with a stunning set from the amazing a cappella vocal group Naturally 7.

It was a day of superlatives. I lost count of the number of people, whom I’d never met before, saying, in the breaks: ’This is amazing!’. 

As one delegate put it, the Nimbus plane took off some time ago, lifted high by client enthusiasm.  And the video message from TIBCO founder and CEO, Vivek Ranadivé, who was keynoting at TUCON in Las Vegas today, confirmed that Nimbus now has an extra large powered-by-TIBCO jet engine strapped under each wing.

As ever, it was Nimbus customers who fizzed with energy. And, as usual, their candor was remarkable: this was real knowledge-sharing among pioneers in an approach to enterprise business process management that will one day be business-as-usual.

My own highlights from the stage, picked out from a packed program, would be...

Tim Leach from Northrop Grumman, on the challenge of bringing together the insights of 23k people (many of them actually rocket scientists, he laughingly pointed out) and aligning them in the cause of continuous improvement. If Northrop Grumman can assemble all the parts for the most advanced aerospace equipment, and keep them aligned so the plane can fly, then why is it such a challenge to get people aligned and flying in formation?  How could it be that having 7k people trained in Six Sigma and Lean was yielding so little in terms of sustainable cost reductions and service improvement? The answer: bring their work together into a single process repository, within a single process architecture, and connect that with how people get real work done. “Our failure”, he said,”was that we tried to build it ourselves. After 18 months we found Nimbus, and that was an immediate 85% of the solution.”

Richard Miller from Marathon Oil, manager of a platform in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea that cost $3bn to build, costs $160m to operate every year – and that pumps $1.6m of oil and gas per day, when everything is working properly. After a Nimbus Control implementation that has successfully enabled a major in-sourcing exercise, and a re-implementation of SAP: "The thing I notice", he said,"is that things are becoming much more predictable. Not just in planning work and the delivery of materials, but right across the business."   

Darren Anderson, Principal Solution Architect for Sony, based in Tokyo, steering Sony's global SAP program (which is his 32nd major SAP implementation), and striving to ensure that process is at its heart. "We had this realization - I knew this but could never vocalize it - that end-to-end process is what we have to focus on." That realization had enabled Sony's European business to reduce the timeline for delivery of an SAP program from two years to just one. "The critical success factor was Nimbus: working around one process. I want the business to be thinking about how to improve the process, not have to think about changes to SAP. Nimbus Control has the potential to accelerate our global program, and to help us win in the marketplace by being One Sony."  

Gregory Reynolds, Head of the BPM Center of Excellence at Nestlé, described as a 'no-brainer' the final decision, after an exhaustive evaluation, to adopt Nimbus Control as Nestlé's global BPM platform. "There's almost unlimited potential", he said,"because continuous improvement is baked into our culture." 

Anne Salétes from Novartis on how Nimbus Control is enabling process improvement in the most challenging regulatory environment by providing end-to-end visibility. "We are all talking about - and challenging - the same perspective on our clinical operations processes. Our people working in clinical trials are, naturally, very precise.  What we are doing is helping them to see the big picture as well. So we can see how we can improve - and show our regulators that we are efficient and managing the risks." 

The funniest moment, for me at least: Richard Parker, co-Founder of Nimbus, talking about the company's evolution within the SAP landscape, and noting that: "We're not just going around helping the victims of SAP implementations any more."  (Images of ambulance-chasing to get to the scene of an implementation and help to restore the vitals of the enterprise fast...)

But I can't neglect to mention the Guide Dogs video, which was hugely inspiring. I happened to meet a delegate from the conference on the train on the way home (as I wrote this - she recognised my conference badge!) - and it was the Guide Dogs, and Naturally 7, that she wanted to talk about.    

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BPM - The Foundation For Operational Excellence

Looking in on rehearsal presentations for Inspiring Performance 2011 next week, it's interesting to see how operational excellence is coming to the fore - and how BPM is central to it. 

Agreed, operational excellence sounds worthy but boring (though execs at UBS might be wishing that they'd paid it more attention).

Agreed too that, while it's a widely used term, there's only a loose consensus on what operational excellence actually means (even the Wikipedia entry includes an appeal for help).

But, however it's defined, or branded within the organization, it's an unqualified good.  Every COO wants it. What's less obvious to many organizations though is how operational excellence is directly linked with Business Process Management.

BPM in its IT incarnation - let's call it 'micro-BPM' - is focussed on automation.  But BPM in its wider sense - 'macro-BPM' - is about operational excellence.  And, in global organizations across every sector, a macro-BPM platform is emerging the essential foundation for operational excellence. 

Talking with clients and colleagues since our first attempt, back in January, to define how you do operational excellence in practice, we've converged on four closely-related capabilities: 

To achieve operational excellence, the enterprise needs the capability...

to understand the whole.  To maintain a complete, holistic and integrated model of the business - including what's automated and what's not, what's outsourced and what's in-house.

to flawlessly execute strategy as end-to-end operational processes. To maintain two-way line of sight between strategy and operating reality.

to continually re-optimize performance by integrating metrics and analytics with end-to-end operational processes and providing the framework for the entire enterprise to collaborate on continuous improvement.

to manage risks, controls, quality and compliance together, within one enterprise-wide and real-time governance framework.

Cue the enterprise-wide BPM platform: the essential enabler for all of these capabilities, and therefore for operational excellence. More on this, after the conference...

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07 Sep 2011    The Social Enterprise: Don't All Speak At Once

11 Aug 2011    Why Management 2.0 Will Be Built Upon BPM

 

The Social Enterprise: Don't All Speak At Once

Larry Dignan at ZDNet nails it in describing the looming 'social sprawl' in A Few Caveats Ahead of Utopia, his take on Dreamforce 2011:

"Every software vendor has some social hook. Let’s say every IT buyer goes whole hog with the social stuff. Well guess what? Now you have HR social features. CRM social. Business execution social. It’s a social fest. Meanwhile, employees are still using Twitter and Facebook. If social sprawl isn’t an issue today, it will be tomorrow. This emerging issue can go two ways for Salesforce. IT buyers can see Salesforce as the great social enterprise consolidator. Or they can close their ears. At this point, it may just be a jump ball."

He's right about the emerging issue of social sprawl. But I think it has a different resolution. It's not a jump ball between Salesforce Chatter and an alternative of a cacophany of voices. There's a rapidly emerging alternative - a process-based paradigm. And the best example may be the convergence of Tibbr with Nimbus Control, which analysts seem to have underplayed in commentary on Tibco's acquisition of Nimbus Partners.

Diversity in our interactions online is natural, just like in the everyday physical world: as Tom Cortese has argued, focussed and niche social networks will always have a place. But the collaboration and dialog that is at at the core of the social enterprise needs structure if it is going to be purposeful.  Especially because, while we may kid ourselves otherwise, the evidence is that actually we're not very good at multi-tasking. 

So what's the context and framework most likely to encourage effective collaboration in the social enterprise? It has to be the processes of the business.  What else is the social enterprise seeking to continually improve and optimize?  Ergo a business process management platform sits at the heart of social enterprise.

After seeing his social baptism ceremony last week, I'm coming over all funny. So, to channel the extraordinary Marc Benioff for a moment: Beware The False BPM Platform!

Is there a single integrated process architecture for the enterprise, with clear line of sight between strategy and operations?  Is there visibility of end-to-end processes, not just what's automated, and across outsourced activities too - and all in the language of the business, not IT-speak? 

No? Then it's a false BPM platform!

Are real-time performance metrics, business controls, compliance and quality, integrated with the end-to-end processes to create the operating system for the enterprise? Does it ensure that Lean and Six Sigma projects are delivering sustainable benefits?  

No? Then it's a false BPM platform!

Does it help people get real work done? Is it deployed to every desktop and mobile device as a personalised intelligent operations manual? Is it easy for every person and process stakeholder - including especially the IT community - to collaborate every day on operational excellence?  

No - then it's a false BPM platform!

Here endeth the diatribe. ;-) 

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07 Feb 2011    Productivity, Well-Being and Process

  

PwC and HfS on Global Business Services Success

Seven out of ten for PwC and HfS on their report: The Evolution of Global Business Services.

Credit where it's due: The report highlights governance as crucial, in a way that's not been done before.  And it's helpful too in setting out models and objectives for global business services. But it's silent on what is rapidly emerging as a fundamental for success.

Governance is a theme running through the report, and it's a mature understanding:

Governance has to be 'ongoing', not project or deal-related. Governance is not about another tool for the vendor management team.

Governance has to be 'well-integrated, consistent and rigorous' and process-oriented, capable of orchestrating change across complex service delivery environments with multiple and diverse stakeholders.

What's missing from the report is the learning that's emerging on how you do this. 

That learning, in a nutshell, is this: the tools which got us this far aren't sufficient to deliver this new world. 

Global business services initiatives are often bogged down, even paralysed, by the tools they are using. The result in many cases: 'a complete mess'.

Everything indicates, as I've noted before, that successful global services organizations will increasingly depend upon an integrated management platform that:

- provides line-of-sight between a target operating model and operational realities

- enables effective collaboration, especially between IT and the business, right across the  complex service delivery and supply chain of the extended exterprise

- embeds governance, compliance and controls within the operational processes

- delivers at the front line and engages the organization in continuous improvement.

This is not about the triumph of the process nerds.  It's about enabling the enterprise to manage effectively in an additional dimension: end-to-end process.   

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08 Aug 2011    Outsourcing Buyers vs Sellers: Swords Into Plowshares

Outsourcing Buyers vs Sellers: Swords Into Plowshares

It was billed as a debate where senior provider and senior buyer executives would 'lock horns to debate the burning issues of today’s outsourcing business'. 

But when HfS Research rustled up its invited audience (impressively close to 500 people, at the height of the holiday season) for its 'Live and Unfiltered' web debate, what stood out was the consensus around the table on the emerging challenges.  

The Buy Family execs - from Northern Trust, Kimberly Clark, Ascension Health and PNM Resources - pretty much lined up with the Sell Family execs - from Genpact, CSC, Accenture and Cognizant - to endorse highlights from the HfS joint study with the LSE:

Hybrid service delivery is the new normal: outsourcing and shared services are set to  increasingly dominate global services delivery - across all industries and regions.

It's not just back-office transformation any more. Shared services and outsourcing initiatives are growing into the middle office, and even into front office support (eg here).

It's way beyond cost reduction, which is taken for granted. It's a search for innovation and nimbleness in service delivery, the kind of flexibility needed to thrive in volatile and hyper-competitive markets.

The emerging challenge: How do you manage this intelligently?

In a world of hybrid service delivery models, where so much is delivered through a  tapestry of providers that is continually changing, how can buyers protect themselves and ensure compliance while at the same time driving innovation and continuous improvement?

It's way beyond contracts and SLAs in Word documents. It demands a governance framework that is way beyond Excel-over-email.  It's why leaders are zeroing in on a new operating system for the enterprise, written in the universal language: end-to-end business process.

This new OS for business sits on what is emerging as essential new infrastructure - an enterprise process management platform, which:

integrates business process with real-time analytics, risks and controls, systems and documents

provides everyone - process owner, stakeholder or user, whether in business or IT - with a personalized perspective of the one process reality

provides collaborative features within a governance framework that fosters innovation and continuous improvement.

It's interesting how the ability to collaborate effectively - in conditions where change is at an ever increasing pace and frequently turbulent - is emerging as a core capability on both sides of the fence. It's the common challenge for both Families, Buy and Sell.

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20 Jun 2011    Building A Robust Global Services Organization

19 May 2011    Service Integration and Process - In Six Minutes

 

BPM: The Invisible Gorilla

Crowds aren't always right. Today's conventional wisdom about business process management is that is tedious, technical and matters only to IT.  I believe that mindset is about to be inverted.

There's a famous experiment where subjects were shown a short video clip of a basketball game. They were asked to count how many times one team took possession of the ball. When asked afterwards, most observers had not noticed that a figure in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the court, turns to face the camera, beats his chest and dances a jig before strolling out of the picture.

What we pay attention to guides our expectations of what we are going to see. If it doesn't fit the template we are currently working with, then often we won't see it (consciously at least), no matter how bizarre.

So how do we ever learn anything new? That's where the brain's right hemisphere comes into play.  But before I go any further, let me acknowledge my inspiration here: A bo0k that took over my summer holiday, possibly one of the most interesting books that I've read in thirty years: The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. 

Managing The Downside Of Global Processes

Why is is that even leading multinationals seem less healthy than successful companies that stick closer to home?

In an article just published Understanding Your Globalization Penalty, a McKinsey team set out to provide some answers.

The findings from McKinsey's organizational health survey data (from 600k people in 500 corporations) was 'troubling'. The weaknesses shown by even multinational leaders 'touch on all three major areas of organizational health—alignment, execution, and renewal'.  The McKinsey team was clearly surprised:

"The global leaders we studied represented the cream of the crop—they not only enjoyed strong financial performance but also had significant global scale and scope, which is why we included them in the sample. If organizations like these can’t stay healthy as they grow globally, can any company?"

To make sense of the data, they went on to interview executives at 50 global corporations. The answers highlighted the familiar challenge: how to balance the benefits of local ownership and focus against the potential benefits of global scale and coordination.

The McKinsey team noted that many multinationals just don't have the collaborative framework in place to make the right choices, and be able to continuously re-optimize as circumstances change:

"Complicating matters further, our interviews suggested that, for most companies, about 30 to 40 percent of existing internal networks and linkages are ineffective for managing global–local trade-offs and instead just add costs and complexity."

This is very much at the centre of our radar at Nimbus. Our clients are looking for a collaborative framework that enables them to manage the trade-off between standard global processes and necessary local variants.  

It's easy to love global processes.  To some extent, they can be imposed - in supplier payment terms, for instance. But, most often, some local variants will be essential for legal reasons, or just plain efficient in overall business terms. And it's always fluid: what is justifiable as a local variant today may not be next year; and sound new reasons may emerge for new variants.

So every enterprise needs a collaborative framework that, on the one hand, enables a relentless convergence towards global processes, and higher levels of automation, but, on the other hand, recognises that standardization is ultimately unattainable, and is able to manage intelligently the local variants and the continual re-optimization of the balance between global and local.

It's a capability that looks set to become ever more crucial. The McKinsey team note that many firms 'are wrestling with the corporate center’s role in their increasingly globalized institutions'. They suggest that 'it may be time for some companies to reimagine what the corporate center does... And since even leading multinationals appear to suffer this globalization penalty, the importance of addressing it will only grow larger in the years ahead'.

Shared Services is usually at the heart of the global processes vs local variants tension. I hope to return to it here over the coming weeks, with some customer examples. It will also be one of the strands in the Shared Services workshop session on Day 2 of the Inspiring Performance 2011 conference in London. So do please register if this floats your boat - spaces are limited - and join the debate.

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20 Jun 2011    Building A Robust Global Services Organization 

19 May 2011    Service Integration and Process: In Six Minutes

 

Building A Robust Global Services Organization

Rick Lucas and Drew Wright at Everest Group sounded an alarm last week about the challenges in building a robust global services management organization.

Highlighting the increasing complexity of global services delivery, they make the point that today's world demands different expertise and new capabilities. Relying upon the skillsets that have worked for the last twenty years could be, they warn, 'catastrophic'.  

It's not just new leadership that we need. As I've argued elsewhere, the complexity and pace of managing global services - the challenge of service integration - demand a similar revolution in process thinking.

The tools and methods that we've used for process management for twenty years won't deliver in today's world either.  They are too technical, fragmentary, ungoverned and disconnected from real business operations. 

Successful global services organizations will rely on process management platforms that can:

- provide line-of-sight between a target operating model and operational realities

- enable effective collaboration, especially between IT and the business

- wrap governance, compliance and controls around the operational processes

- deliver at the front line and engage the organization in continuous improvement.

Everest makes the case for recruiting the right talent 'to execute with excellence and deliver the next generation of value from global services'. But even the best talent can't deliver sustainable excellence without a joined-up view of the business.

Optimizing service delivery across supply chains that are global, cross-business and cross-service providers, demands transparency, shared understanding and clear accountability. Cue the enterprise process management platform, the crucial enabler.

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Shared Services: Rethinking Process Management

Drawing on data published recently by Deloitte and HfS/Hackett...

How Shared Services optimization demands a new approach to process management. 

In three slides:

Download Shared Services - Rethinking Process Management - 26 May 2011

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