Workleaf

I haven’t seen outsourcing service providers position themselves in the “Business Continuity” service provisioning sector, although I see their services being used for that purpose – Either intentionally or otherwise. A few months back, the Outsourcing Institute hosted an awards ceremony to recognize exceptional service in the various sectors of outsourcing services. One award caught my attention – Wipro won the award for their service towards one of the leading airlines in the U.S. for providing exceptional service during Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, this airlines’ customer support infrastructure was severely affected during the hurricane and they needed a quick and effective failover option. They looked towards Wipro, who were already providing them with customer support services from offshore locations, to help them in this regard. Aparently, Wipro moved quickly to take-over the additional overhead without a questions, thus giving the airlines, sufficient time to get their U.S.-based infrastructure back in place.

This example goes to show that corporations need not necessarily look at outsourcing as a cost cutting initiative. In today’s highly regulated and compliance intensive business environment, enterprises are hard-pressed to devise cost-effective ways of compliance. Compliance also includes business continuity and disaster recovery. Offshore service providers would be an ideal candidate since they not only provide offshore locations for business process mirroring, but they also provide significant cost savings.

Why aren’t enterprises looking at outsourcing as a “one stone two birds” solution? I think that it is up to the service providers to include this in their marketing/sales pitch. These days, when hardware costs are going down, setting up mirror infrastructure will not prove as expensive as it was a few years ago. Therefore, I beleive that outsourcing service providers should include business continuity as a part of their service offering and get into an educating mode in their sales pitch. What differentiates service providers from each other anyway? Most of the large enterprises are already aware of the costs, benefits and risks associated with outsourcing. The need for educating the business user and evangelizing the process of outsourcing is in its decline. Thus, outsourcing services (in general) is becoming a commodity. Service providers need to have an educational component in their sales/marketing pitch to differentiate themselves from other plain-vanilla me-too providers. Business Continuity is one such area where the benefits are evident upfront.

Would love to hear your comments on this one.
(By the way – these are are not “random ramblings”. I was a part of business continuity planning effort for an international bank during Y2K. It sucked ‘coz I had to spend my New Years’ eve on December 31st 1999 watching the clock tick past 11:59:59 and have my phone ready in case everything failed!)

First of all – Thank You… for wishing me luck.

Second of all – I Am Back!
Life after an MBA is a bit different from the routine as a b-school student. The last few weeks were extremely stressful. I wonder why because I was not doing any case analysis or team assignments. But still, it felt as if the stress of the last 1 year came down on my shoulders in one swift swoop! Suddenly I found myself jobless, and wandering aimlessly through my day.

I call it the MBA Hangover! The stress of not having stress was extremely stressfull!!!
Anywayz… now I am back. Being out in the open job market feels good. Lots of interviews, phone calls and emails on a daily basis. I consider myself lucky, compared to a few of my other classmates who are still struggling. I even gave a session on career management to the incoming class, sharing my experience and the lessons that I have learnt in the past few weeks. So far, so good. It needs to be seen where my career takes me to.

Now that I am back in action, and I have doing some interesting stuff lately, this blog will be brimming with ideas again. Thank you for you patience and for continuing to visit my blog.