The IT industry saw a rise in the number of third-party resources being contracted in the years following the economic downturn. Some organizations employed third-party resources in the absence of a sourcing strategy. This resulted...
in increased operational costs, poor resource utilization and inconsistent standards. This called for a sound sourcing strategy which would consolidate service providers and contractors, optimizing resource management. In this paper, our experts propose a framework, designed to capture and document specific goals and objectives of consolidation. It examines the potential risks associated with consolidation and the importance of organizational readiness. The proposed framework will help CIOs and IT managers design less complex, cost-effective, and low-risk sourcing solutions with the help of a well-balanced and effective consolidation initiative.
The consolidation of business and IT services across enterprise units into one or more shared services is an established means to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. Today’s organizations have the option of choosing from multiple approaches ...
to implement it. Our expert presents an overview of shared services and provides an insight into its relationship with outsourcing. Our expert also discusses a structured approach to establish shared services.
Fixed price and time and materials pricing models are well established in application outsourcing services. Infosys’ experts propose an alternative pay-per-use model - Unit of Work (UoW) pricing. This approach requires collaboration, mature service management processes, and disciplined...
governance between clients and service providers. Our experts discuss how UoW pricing enables migration from fixed to variable costs by helping clients adjust spend in response to changing business conditions. Significantly, Unit of Work pricing optimizes outsourcing costs and introduces discipline into demand planning and resource utilization.
As Flat World companies adopt a global sourcing strategy, business and IT leaders must manage the transition from staff augmentation to a strategic partner approach. This paper focuses on the organizational and people changes...
that optimize a global sourcing program. Infosys' experts discuss leadership competencies and identify challenges associated with an enterprise and its people.
Outsourcing empowers companies to deal with economic uncertainty by improving their business models and developing strategies that are better aligned with market realities. IT and Business Process Outsourcing offer flexibility...
and scalability benefits that enhance an organization's efficiency and productivity. This paper examines how organizations can leverage global sourcing to their advantage in the current economic scenario. It proposes a framework to understand how key elements of global sourcing can be used to cope with uncertainty.
The role of IT service partners has transformed from technologists to strategic value contributors. Multi-sourcing enables clients to leverage the skills of each vendor, enhance efficiency and reduce risk. ...
The emergence of virtualization and pay-per-use models has added to the complexity of outsourcing relationships. In this paper, Infosys' experts examine the evolution of IT services and demonstrate how Infosys addresses the emerging challenges of the Flat World.
Establishing captive centers is a key element in your outsourcing strategy. This research paper reveals valuable data about captives. It indicates that organizations both in India and China favor a portfolio approach to outsourcing, where captive centers...
are accompanied by strong third-party vendor relationships.
The IT outsourcing industry is witnessing an interesting phenomenon: While the number of sourcing contracts is on the rise, Total Contract Value (TCV) is steadily declining. As the industry moves into shorter contracts, lower value, multiple vendors and...
best-of-breed solutions, organizations need to redefine and reinvent their approach to outsourcing. This paper analyzes the evolution of outsourcing and discusses how companies can reap the benefits of best-of-breed sourcing through Infosys' Modular Global Sourcing approach.
The term 'offshore outsourcing' conjures images of work flowing from large corporations to outsourcing service providers halfway around the world. The rapidly growing Indian IT and BPO industry ...
makes it appear that projects are simply sent offshore. However, the facts of outsourcing are different. Organizations need to structure their outsourcing relationships with the right sourcing models in order to ensure that desired business outcomes are realized. This paper introduces the most common outsourcing models.
Changes driven by globalization, demographics, technology and regulation are leveling the business playing field and creating a Flat World. Competing in the flattening world requires companies to shift operational priorities in four areas defined as the four shifts...
required to win in the Flat World. The capabilities to master these Flat World shifts require businesses to be not just efficient, but also nimble, flexible and innovative. An organization's sourcing strategy needs to drive these, seemingly contradictory, suite of capabilities. Modular Global Sourcing, an outsourcing approach pioneered by Infosys, provides the framework to use sourcing strategy to master Flat World shifts.
Global sourcing has become a change agent in high-technology manufacturing — causing dramatic shifts in how and where product components and capabilities are sourced, and where work gets done. High-technology companies are facing mounting pressure on basic R&D and product development fronts...
, due to increasing consumer demand for innovative, feature-rich products, accompanied by shrinking product lifecycles and declining price points. Global sourcing offers an increasingly attractive proposition to address these pressures. Globalization of product development is the inevitable next stage to enhance the competitiveness of high-tech companies in the Flat World.
High-tech companies achieve success not only when they bring their products to the market quickly, but also when they create and develop products to meet customer needs, at the right time. ...
This paper identifies key characteristics that predict a company's ability to successfully leverage global sourcing partners for new product development and new product introduction activities.
Achieving system performance in a way that reduces risk and improves cost-effectiveness and time-to-market for performance-critical systems is one of the principal goals of IT organizations. It requires a holistic and quantitative approach to...
performance, without compromising on other system qualities such as flexibility, maintainability, reliability, and usability. Infosys has put into practice such an approach by combining practices in performance engineering with client delivery experience. Adapted to ensure collaboration among globally distributed application development teams, this approach combines performance modeling with benchmarking, tuning, and optimization to deliver high-performance systems.
Given the importance of effective outsourcing relationships on the growth and profitability of large enterprises, it is essential to revisit relationships and consider elements that are essential to their success. One of the reasons why organizations fail ...
to develop successful outsourcing relationships is that they start off on the wrong foot. A true outsourcing relationship is best viewed as a long-term process in which parties develop increasing levels of trust and understanding of the customer's business goals and the value that the service provider can deliver.
As the business environment becomes more dynamic, organizations are looking beyond efficiency in their IT initiatives. Business-IT alignment and innovation have become key requirements. ...
The application of the Modular Global Sourcing framework developed by Infosys in a dynamic business environment, clearly shows the effectiveness of outsourcing business processes, applications and infrastructure to a single vendor. Single-point responsibility inherent in such an arrangement helps improve alignment between business goals and the IT effort.
Organizations leveraging the latest model of IT outsourcing — Multi-Sourcing — benefit from the skills and efficiencies of multiple vendors, but are faced with the challenges of retaining a holistic view of the company's IT infrastructure, applications and processes. ...
Infosys has refined the concept of Operational Level Agreements to balance the benefits and challenges of multi-sourcing. This metrics-based approach sets rules by demarcating responsibilities between vendors, defines interaction for delivery of services and provides incentives for adherence.
As global sourcing matures, organizations are moving away from a short-term project view to a long-term outlook where they can leverage the benefits of global sourcing and build capabilities in partnership with their vendors. They are looking beyond annual agreements...
and are evolving multiple ADM projects into multi-year strategic relationships with selected partners. This provides the vendors with incentives to invest the knowledge gained through the relationship back into the client. It also pushes them to devise ideas that bring about sustainable improvements and business results.
Captive centers are being used by several players to offshore work to India, in order to gain control over assets, intellectual property and core business activities. To understand the evolution of captives in India, Infosys conducted a study ...
covering large companies across industries. The results indicate a highly competitive industry dominated by a few, very large centers and populated with a growing number of new entrants. Most captives in India are planning strong growth, but important questions remain over the future of a vast majority of small, new captives that are trying to scale up alongside much larger competitors. Research by Infosys undergoes the need for a strategic approach to captives. A clear definition of the activities to be undertaken by the captive unit, as well as its size and its understanding of the strategic importance of offshore operations are key factors determining success.
Under pressure to deliver short-term, quarter-to-quarter results, today's businesses are driven to manage operational efficiencies, making it a challenge to maintain strategic and innovation focus. To be world-class competitors in this environment,...
enterprises need to deliver breakthrough results by combining business alignment with continual operational efficiency.
With global sourcing gaining acceptance, business and IT executives are increasingly realizing the need for effective change management. So what makes organizational change management and global sourcing a winning combination?...
Today, the main challenges faced during organizational change management are time zone differences, disparities in communication and cultural norms, retention of critical skills, and motivational issues. These challenges, if not identified, could result in productivity losses and difficult transitions. The success of this transformation depends on the most critical asset – its people. Infosys offers a strategic and tactical solution to help clients manage change effectively by addressing employee-related issues that arise during the multiple stages of a global sourcing initiative. The organizational change management suite designed by Infosys understands your needs and helps you secure stakeholder commitment upfront by managing your clients' concerns on an ongoing basis.
Lack of scalability of the IT delivery organization has become a major impediment to achieving synergies across Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) initiatives. Global sourcing can provide a solution to scale requirements...
. However, it needs to be undertaken in a modular fashion. CIOs need to collaborate with business and sourcing partners to devise a strategic approach to Modular Global Sourcing and must enforce enterprise-wide business-IT alignment.