The Next Big (Vision) Thing

I've spent quite a bit of time in recent weeks with clients who are looking to outsourcing to accomplish some mighty big things.

Our industry has long spoken about "transformation" to mean a sourcing solution that goes beyond a simple fix to pervade an entire enterprise and accomplish something on a bigger scale. Most often the term has been bandied about to talk about overhauling IT, a call center or financial-reporting activities. All those transformations are still occurring and are still relevant.

But what I'm seeing and hearing about is an even more ambitious flavor of change - one that has captured the fancy of some very progressive executives. These leaders share a vision of fundamentally reorienting and resizing their organizations – with outsourced services as the tool for doing so. Among other things, they're targeting operations that could become more productive by having a more responsive and flexible infrastructure delivered through expert outsourcing.

This reminds me of my days running infrastructure services for a global investment bank that I'd like to think was quite progressive. Indeed, while our scope of responsibility was limited to the basic computing and communications services, the leaders of the bank created forums to directly align technology and operations - essentially to find ways that the outsourced infrastructure services might accrue benefits in productivity or efficiency to the teams that actually used the technology to do their jobs.

Now it's happening everywhere: Executives see outsourcing as a means to a much broader end state, and the transformations they are considering go well beyond the domain limits of individual functions.

Isn't this just business process outsourcing I'm talking about?  Maybe, but it has a distinct vertical orientation to it – meaning it's often BPO for companies that are looking to effect the broadest definition of people-intensive work processes.

Conceptually, the idea has been around for a while, but the appetite for change through outsourcing is just now starting to ramp up. It's exciting to be part of.