Sourced & Shared Posts
It’s time to question why there is not much talent interoperability between the so-called buy and sell sides.
Is it time to be deliberately Darwinian about business services talent, forcing cross-breeding betw...
What’sYour GBS?
"Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder" goes the old saying. And when I look around at the feeding frenzy surrounding GBS (global business service) models as the latest sourcing trend, I’d say that a majori...
All Things To All People: Why Shared Services And Outsourcing Stakeholder Management Fails
Published: 2014-03-23
Published: 2014-03-23
Ask any leader trying to transform his or her organization through shared services and outsourcing who their stakeholders are, and they’ll come up with the standard list—the business units, executive management and perhaps even t...
Nothing new—will it all be me, too?
Having just completed the requisite round of "will 2014 be a good year for shared services and outsourcing?" chats with the great and the good, I&...
There seems to be a sea change in the market for senior global services talent as a category. Just a year or so ago, talent that was deeply competent in sourcing—design, selection, transition and governance—was hard to find, and...
Will shared services leaders take the GBS helm?
Current common wisdom assumes that GBS leadership is the pinnacle of career progression for shared services leaders. After all, who’s the logical inheritor of t...
Several weeks ago I opined on the change management lessons easily derived from that two-year long circus we politely call an
Lessons, you say? From that circus called a U.S. presidential election? Believe it or not, the high jinks of the candidates provide great learnings f...
Recently, it dawned on me that the sourcing industry is pursuing a great game of navel gazing. We’re like a closed society—we think we have all the answers, yet I’m not sure we know what all the questions are. Isn&rs...
You may not have caught the Happiness at Work survey, representing the statistically meaningful responses of over 11,000 people in 90 countries. Or perhaps you thought it was...
Finance and accounting shared services and outsourcing – only a work in progress?
Published: 2012-10-17
Published: 2012-10-17
Go to most shared services and outsourcing conferences, and the high level take...
If you’re British, please be assured that I am not talking about ladies of the night, but a trend that I’ve been increasingly aware of over the last month or so. Seems that suddenly there’s more really good talent—bot...
"Love means never having to say you’re sorry." You may not remember the insipid line from that soppy 1970 movie, Love Story, which had every American teenage girl groping for a box of tissues as Jennifer took her last breath. But in the co...
CIVET: Is it a small, lithe-bodied, mostly nocturnal mammal native to tropical Asia and Africa? a musky scent used in perfume or a rock band? No! – it’s the acronym for the nex...
Anyone see Outsource last night? Turning outsourcing into comedy is one of American television’s attempts to dominate the Nielsen ratings. The formula appears to be this: take every Indian clichê in the book an...
"Lady, that's not in my workflow"- or how sourcing gets in the way of customer service
Published: 2012-08-15
Published: 2012-08-15
If you’re tired of hearing all the rants in the media about outsourcing by folks who don’t have a clue about the difference between shared services and outsourcing and offshoring, take heart. There actually is a journo out there who’s moved beyond...
Sit down with some of the more successful leaders in this industry, and you’ll often find that there is an itch that must be scratched much sooner than the proverbial 7 years. It seems that after he or she has...
It’s one of the things that bollixes me most about shared services and outsourcing—clients or internal customers are supposed to "get it" without ever being asked for the sale. We think that the numbers speak chapters, and that good...
Last week I got one of those calls from a headhunter. "Deborah, you’ve been mentioned by several people as someone I should talk to. My client is looking for someone who will lead our global shared services...
As organizations institutionalize shared services models, top leadership talent is increasingly at a premium. If you’ve had a chance to glance at the recent Russell Reynold/SSON survey, How to Keep Your Job in...
One of the observations I have about the global services industry is that there’s a pervasive belief that smart people can do anything. If you can solution, you can sell. If you’re a great delivery professional, you certainly can develop t...
Gershwin did not know that he was talking about global services delivery when he penned the words to his magnificent opera Porgy and Bess. Think a no is a no? It ain’t necessarily so.
I’d hazard a guess that the most importa...
Having just come off a week of hiking 75 miles of the El Camino de Santiago, one of Christendom’s top three pilgrimages, I had a bit of time to think. As I struggled to put one foot in front of the other, I had...
Your organization has decided to change the delivery model. Stakeholders accept that in situ transformation is too costly/slow/under resourced/not aggressive enough/will not send the right message. The next decision? Make or buy/shared services...
Backshoring challenges: Over the last decade, the support workforce has been systematically hollowed out, resulting in a dearth of thirty-somethings that can not only manage teams, but also have the technical knowled...
