at really well when I outsourced my training in DuPont years ago. Subsequently, when I led outsourcing processes with a number of other companies, we performed very well and delivered immense value. From the outsourcers’ side, unless you’re responsible for the processes for understanding needs and determining solutions, it’s hard to be held accountable for the value. In the absence of those things, the most that you can hold an outsourcer accountable for is:
• Quality processes
• Cost reduction
• Cycle time
Those sorts of things on the transaction related elements and quality of content that you purchase if you’re purchasing from a third party content provider.
So, those are the three arguments. The last one crosses the barrier between internal and provider organizations. So, when I look at outsourcing today, there’s been a pretty significant change in how we do outsourcing today in the marketplace. The marketplace has evolved from comprehensive outsourcing to outsourcing of specific elements or specific services and the research says that the things that are being outsourced the most are custom content development, training administration primarily in large companies, not in small companies, and some delivery. And, of course, organizations are moving more toward software as a service hosted, learning technology model, where they don’t require resources to support systems and those sorts of things. And sometimes you’ll see organizations outsourcing combinations of those things. And while those are good things to outsource and, in fact, they offer the opportunity to reduce cost, they also limit the ability for the outsourcing provider to make a huge impact on the value side of the equation.
So, as organizations do this work and outsource these kinds of things, they must take the next step, which is to improve their internal processes for:
• Linking to the business
• Understanding needs
• Engaging with customers
• Understanding customer expectations
• Ensuring that the work they do is relevant and linked to something important and that they understand and can document the value being delivered for the work they do
If we do this well, it will eliminate a lot of objections that we hear from organizations as they think about or talk about outsourcing and it will hopefully move them from the side of “I’m not interested in this” to the side of “I actually should consider it because there’s sufficient experience in the marketplace to say that organizations that do outsourcing, at some level, do get some benefit.”
So, why don’t I stop here and welcome all your comments, inputs, critiques, support, and all the things that go along with these blogs. I look forward to hearing from you. And I have two more blogs to do to end this series on “The View is Worth the Climb.” This last one on outsourcing is one of those things that I say along the road, “This is one of the things that if you do well, makes the view worth the climb.”
Click on the link below for the podcast version of this blog post.