Shifting to the Real World

Ok, I shared the nuances of my journey to land a new role in the global souricng industry and it's time to shift my focus on this blog to the real world experiences I am enjoying.

Changing jobs is never as easy as it sounds (maybe it actually doesn't even sound easy!), but my transition from the Advise-side to the Sell-side of the industry is going fairly well. What I'm trying to do is perpetuate an emphasis on the "value to the Client" and use that vantage to guide the go-to-market thinking of CSC's Managed Services Sector. Well ... that's how I'm approaching the scope anyway.

Those of you who know me well will appreciate that I won't use this forum to prosteletize for CSC. Just as I did from the TPI platform, I will focus on issues, trends, and observations.

My entry into the Sell-side world of sourcing is enabled by a great network of colleagues across CSC, Advisory firms, Clients, Researchers, and other Service Providers. I've enjoyed great conversations over the past week with several dozen people and they've all been reassuring. That is, the common theme has been "you can make a difference." That's all any of us really want, isn't it?

So, the "real world" orientation that I am going to accentuate is that of vertical value-creation. What's that mean, you ask? I find that Client organizations, and their Shared Services Operations and Service Providers, have grown comfortable living in the world of horizontal thinking. Kind of like laying flat? No ... it's the art of focusing on discrete units of a system - the pieces and parts.

I find that there is diminishing satisfaction, and marginal added value, from perpetuating a focus on improving the performance characteristics of discrete parts. It was a worthy cause - and one which dominated the internal/external sourcing landscape for the past several years. But, its time has passed.

As one CIO recently told me, "The sourcing industry has been focused on productizing its offerings, but what our business needs is the services that unify those products."

I think we're starting to see some industries step forward to unify the infrastructure, applications and operations (the three legs of the proverbial stool) around integrated services. The essential enabling capability here is "the network" - the element of infrastructure that allows the flow of work among participating systems (be those people or applications). Think about the media/entertainment segment. What about telecommunications? And, basic business applications.

So ... that's going to be my "real world" shift in emphasis. I'll share examples of the verticalization (is that a word?) of sourcing. Drop me a note or post a comment with your thoughts, but this is what gets me excited for my new role in our industry.

Source on!