Smartsourcing: Driving Innovation and Growth Through Outsourcing Summary:
By Thomas M. Koulopoulos, Tom Roloff
Publisher: Platinum Press
Number Of Pages: 274
Publication Date: 2006-04-01
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 159337514X
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781593375140
Product Description:
Management guru and bestselling business author, Tom Peters, has called Thomas Koulopoulos' writing, "a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive." Outsourcing is the most popular movement of the new global business economy. In fact, the typical executive will soon spend one-third of his or her budget on outsourcing. But the smart ones will spend it on smartsourcing. Smartsourcing goes a step further by showing companies how to partner with service providers strategically-to not only cut costs but increase innovation as well. Rather than moving the work to where the least expensive workers are, Smartsourcing shows you how to abandon the status quo-and make outsourcing an opportunity to improve operations across the full spectrum of your business. The first book to be ahead of the curve, Smartsourcing is the hands-on guide every manager needs to capitalize on one of the most important shifts in business today. Not since the industrial revolution has there been such a dramatic change in how-and where-work is performed. In today's marketplace, a company's products and services must be positioned and sold against global competitors with larger, cheaper, and highly skilled workforces. Organizations today are faced with significant quandaries, including how to:
Cut costs while increasing innovation Grow the business-and maintain accountability-while moving operations offsite Increase productivity and efficiency By embracing the next evolution of outsourcing. Smartsourcing enables an organization to focus on what it does best while the outsourcing partner takes responsibility for innovating change and cost-control in non-core operations. The result is a strategic and synergistic relationship that enables each organization to benefit from the other's expertise and ultimately increase productivity and profitability. Smartsourcing provides a roadmap for navigating today's shifting marketplace, and shows how outsourcing can add value to your business, your products and your customers.Summary: Outsourcing explained, and made easier.Rating: 4This book is a great resource for outsourcing and offshoring, but as technology grows, as mentioned, online sources can be used just effectively, particularly for research. Sites like [...] give a massive workforce at very little cost to the user. Outsourcing simplified- finally! It is a simple fact that in today's world, nearly every growing company will have to outsource at least some work at one time or another and this is just one of the many great places to get what you need at a fair rate.Summary: This is a great book about the fascinating current trend in the global marketRating: 5This is a great book about the fascinating current trend in the global market. Personally, one point I found interesting was about innovation; it gives us a new outlook on outsourcing and off-shoring. In our company we are talking about "Right Shore": the right resources at the right location at the right time. If reorganization is done successfully and strategy is right, then come Right Shore and smart-sourcing. They leverage the capacity, capabilities, cost advantages and competencies of your company across geographies. Vital factors in this process of outsourcing are the choice of an outsourcer and the location chosen for outsourcing. The authors remind once again that the trend toward offshore/outsourcing is a lot more complex than simply seeking skills and resources in the lowest-cost locations. For instance the driving forces in the IT outsourcing market are quality and speed to market, not just cost of services. Last but not least, the book is easy to read and without too much of abbreviations and MBA jargon. Summary: MindblowingRating: 5Driving Innovation and Growth Through Outsourcing Smartsourcing by Thomas M. Koulopoulos and Tom Roloff - is sub-titled 'Driving innovation and Growth through Outsourcing' this goes straight to the point which seems to be an habit of the authors who does not beat around the bush and dive directly into the nuts and bolts of their subject, which makes Smartsoucing a very insightful read. Like Thomas Friedman, the authors agree that the world is flat, that we are now evolving in a global economy where work flows like water along the path of least resistance, leading jobs to be moved out of the United States and Western Europe and to be reallocated to Asia or whatever other places where wages are more attractive. That is what offshoring and outsourcing are all about, cost reductions. Smartsoursing presents a different approach and is based on the premise that outsourcing for the only intend of cost reductions is highly dangerous and does not yield the return on investment it promised. In the Smartsourcing framework, in order to outsource any organization has to go through a strategic reorganization of itself, to understand what could be, and more importantly what should be outsourced, and of course what is core to the enterprise and therefore should be not only kept in-house, but also invested in. The point is simple, in order to success on a global scale an organization must focus on what it does the best, and to do so it must shift from the traditional Functional thinking to a Process thinking. Indeed, processes offer visibility, agility and a set of metrics can be used to evaluate their performance and therefore compare them to the industry standard. Doing so, an organization can understand what its strength and weaknesses are. Outsourcing or offshoring non core processes will boost the efficiency of the complete value chain, since the sourcing partner will execute those processes more efficiently because what is non core to an organization should be core to its sourcing partner. Of course this is an high level view, Smartsourcing provides the tools by which organizations can thrive in this new framework, creating value by: keeping the light on for less, creating more innovation for the given dollar, transferring risk between the partners and optimizing risks transference After a keen analyze of the technical solution available to organizations nowadays, the Authors share their view on that market and the way it will evolve to a new generation of BSPs creating a new generation of smartsourcing hubs orchestrating business components across executable business processes. According to the Authors, the evolution of the software industry will "dwarf the technology industry of the next fifty years" and B2B vendors have a key role to play in that move to a purely efficient market where the transfer cost, that is the cost of "unplugging and plugging back to another ecosystem" would no longer be a measurable impediment. Once a process has been identified as core to an organization, the rate of the innovation on that given process must increase, allowing it to keep its competitive advantage. And the cash flow to aliment the innovation trend comes directly from the money made out of outsourcing. According to the Authors, for every dollar of work offshored $1.20 to $1.40 is created in additional return and this money should be the venture capital of the innovation economy. Don't underestimate this point, after an agricultural based economy, followed by an industrial age, followed by a service based economy, we are now entering the area of innovation and the "invented in" label will have more value attached to it than the "made in" label. Therefore the innovation process becomes a challenge, and it requires its own set of skills. It is vital for our economy that we learn how to innovate through learning tools such as CPS - Creative Problem Solving for the future begins with the challenges we face today. Smartsoucing is a hell of a good read and is fascinating because of the insightful, visionary comments of its writers. Thomas M. Koulopoulos, is known for his colon in The Economist, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal and his broadcasts on CNBC and CNN. He is also the CEO of the Delphi Group. Tom Roloff is a leading business strategist, Vice President and CTO of EMC corporation. Both made a very good work with this wake-up call book offering us a glance at what will be the future of the software industry as well as the way businesses will evolve. As they wrote : "We apologize for sounding the fire alarm. But don't confuse the inconvenience of being awoken from a sound sleep with the greater threat posed by the flames at your backside."Summary: An excellent view on outsourcingRating: 5The book takes a slightly different tack on how outsourcing should be viewed and how companies should use it. The overall effect is a little like that described by Hagel and Seely-Brown in The Only Sustainable Edge, but Tom writes a very readable book covering three key trends, all described cogently and without too much MBA-speak. In particular he does a good job contrasting outsourcing and smartsourcing - there is a focus on differentiation over commoditization and on strategic excellence combined with agility (one of my favorite topics). Anyway, the book outlines three themes: Movement to external economies of scale Shift from ownership to strategy The evolution of the placeless job The overall approach can best be summarized by one quote from the book where he says that an "organization's intellectual resources are maximized because they are not distracted by nonessential work". A highly recommended book.Summary: SUPERB!Rating: 5The book exceeded my expectations as I thought it to be the University material I didn't have available during my studies. I would very much like to see it hitting the Greek market as well. Very competent writing and numerous opportunities for creative thinking. A very useful tool for people involved in the process of successful business strategy formulation and implementation.
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