SSON Week Europe 2012 – was Amsterdam worth the trip?

When SSON invited me to attend their flagship European event in Amsterdam last month, I entered the RAI conference centre thinking it would be just another conference. I was wrong!

The atmosphere was energizing. The delegates didn’t need a KPMG study to tell them that shared services is the fastest growing segment in sourcing. It was in the air: the excitement, the opportunities, the challenges that fast growth brings with it. And most of all, the people: what we often call "talent."

But how do you know it’s worth coming?

Conferences are excellent venues for knowledge sharing and exchange. With about 700 delegates, this one was also a good networking opportunity. But to me, the conference offered a rare opportunity to learn about the people who are the engines behind the fastest growing segment in outsourcing. The little stories were interesting: a bunch of South Africans with great ideas for BPO services; the people from Poland who were so confident in the service quality and talent supply their country can offer any multinational’ a Polish shared services centre that used to be owned by Philips and is now a BPO operation run by Infosys; a group of Germans who smartly positioned their country as a promising destination for a long-term investment; and the people who represented Northern Ireland and Scotland as attractive destinations for setting up shared service centres in those regions. There were also the warriors of the industry from the Hackett Group, WNS, Cognizant and many others who have done a great job explaining how they bring value to their customers.

As I travelled back from SSON Week, I tried to reflect on several issues that emerged during my conversations with people:

The "beauty contest" between countries and regions to attract SSCs is accelerating. Even more interesting is the fact that any country, even those that used to be considered onshore, is now considered either a near-shore or an offshore destination. This is rather confusing as it makes the sourcing decision even more complicated than it used to be. Can we still ask: where is offshore for you? Probably not! For some multinationals, offshore is Germany or Scotland! We are clearly elevating expectations to see higher-value delivered by SSCs and vendors. There seems to have been an agreement that SSCs and vendors have to engage in transforming how the client firm does business. My own impression from my own research as well as talks with clients and vendors is that while the rhetoric is about higher-value deliverables, in reality both sides still struggle to define and monitor such deliverables. Captive shared services have become a global phenomenon. What is still missing in this growth path is a global strategy that integrates the captive shared services strategy into the firm’s global strategy. As long as executives treat captive shared services as a "must have" cost centre, the true potential of these units cannot be unleashed. If you want to prepare your firm for these changes then I recommend you attend the next SSON Week!