On the 9th and 10th November, the thought leaders of the outsourcing community gathered in London to debate the latest trends, learn from each other’s experiences and award best practice.
For the first time ever, the National Outsourcing Association merged its annual Sourcing Summit and Awards Ceremony. Combined, the event attracted over 600+ senior outsourcing professionals and featured conference sessions, roundtables, and exhibitions; culminating in the prestigious NOA Awards Ceremony.
Martyn Hart, NOA Chairman, opened the Summit and said: “Everyone here is making a great contribution to the continued success of private & public sector organisations – cutting waste, streamlining processes, ensuring quality and saving money. This has allowed the UK outsourcing market to almost grow to almost the same size as the financial services market to around 8% of annual UK GDP. Our industry can make a huge contribution to getting the economy growing, given the efficiencies possible with outsourcing, shared services and even insourcing, we need to be more than 8%!”
Duncan Aitchison, President, EMEA, TPI and Karl Flinders, journalist, Computer Weekly, provided an industry update in session one and highlighted the major trends from 2011 as well as future predictions.
Duncan said: “Multi-sourcing as an outsourcing practice is more common than ever with many transactions including offshore delivery. In 2012 there will be a continued growth in savings realised through outsourcing especially in the public sector and cloud will be likely to be cannibalistic.”
Karl provided an update on cloud computing and where the technology will be heading in 2012.
Karl said: “Cloud computing has the potential to be game changing. Case studies are already showcasing immediate savings of 25% are not uncommon. Is cloud green? Probably not, data centres need to be built quickly and environmental issues do not seem to be of key importance at the moment.”
The next session gave delegates the choice of attending one of two streams.
The mid-life crisis session posed the question whether to renew, retender or renegotiate. Darrell Stein, Director and IT and Logistics, Marks and Spencer, and Matt Bennett, Legal Director, Olswang, presented on the questions you should ask during an outsourcing agreement.
The second stream provided a guide to sourcing and Heather Rodgers, Chief Procurement Officer, Centrica, gave a presentation on the variety of sourcing models and highlighted how organisations can save money from outsourcing.
During the break, delegates mingled in the exhibition area and spoke to the multitude of sponsors present. Session two was focused on public sector outsourcing and three key speakers Tim Leaver, Chief Procurement Officer, Land Registry; John Varney, former CTO, Essex County Council; and Jim Reed, Director of Procurement, Nottingham University, were introduced by the host – Paul Robb, NOA Board Member.
John emphasised the importance of relationships and said: “Outsourcing can go wrong for one reason – partnerships. Partnerships are a way to describe contracts however a true partnership is a component of a complex outsourcing agreement - one of which isn’t just based on the contract. Ultimately outsourcing is a battlefield - meetings happen, minutes are taken but the mountain of innovation and transformation are often solely placed on the supplier which can be very dangerous.”
Then came the whisky! Scottish Development International (SDI) provided a fine selection of malts to a thirsty mob gathered around their stand, and Douglas McCheyne, Senior Executive of International Marketing, was delighted how the event was “helping to keep Scotland at front of mind when investment decisions are made.”
The opening of Day Two was chaired by Andy Rogers, Senior Project Manager, National Grid and NOA Board Member who passed the mantle on to Tony Morgan, Chief Innovation Officer, to chair session three on innovation.
Karene House, Principal Advisor, Sourcing Advisory, KPMG, presented key findings from recent NOA / KPMG Research - Driving Innovation through Collaboration and gave some key insights on how innovation works in practice.
After the break, session four focused on the number one outsourcing hot topic – Cloud Computing. Andy Rogers chaired the session and looked at the impact of cloud computing and software as a service. Ian McDonald, Head of Infrastructure and Cloud, News International and Siki Giunta, Vice President of Cloud Computing and Software Services disseminated their thoughts on cloud pricing models, managing risks in the cloud, application strategies and key case studies.
Siki said: “There are multiple concerns and challenges to cloud adoption. The IDG/IDC research referenced earlier indicates that IT executives are concerned with security, loss of control, and fear of vendor lock-in; business executives are concerned with lack of the necessary skills/training. 88% indicated that if they could achieve the same or better security as their internal data center, they would move more applications and workloads to the cloud.
“The use of a public cloud is too risky for those that have stringent security and compliance requirements. To address this challenge, CSC has introduced BizCloud a private cloud billed as a service and deployed behind your firewall.”
After lunch, the theme of the breakout sessions was focused on managing relationships. Felicia Trewin, Director, Deloitte and NOA Board Member, chaired the benchmarking session and introduced Michael Gallagher, Product Marketing Director, Omnext, and Turnstone Services as the key speakers. The session addressed concerns such as how benchmark data should be used to improve provider performance, when the best time is to plan benchmarking activity and what should be measured to ensure a good deal going forward.
The next session on global sourcing addressed the implications of political instability and strategies to recover and safeguard for the future. Michael Stock, Coach First International, chaired the session with speakers including Daniel Naoum, Value Shore; Vicente Orts, Promomadrid; Phil Taylor, Stratchclyde University; and Glenn Warren, Deutsche Bank AG.
Daniel said: “Global sourcing is about strategic sourcing irrespective of national boundaries in today’s global setting, aiming to exploit global efficiencies in service delivery. While labour cost arbitrage remains a fundamental driver in migration related to lower-value-added processes and developments, it does not play such significant role when relocating higher-skilled innovation work.”
Following a survey conducted by the NOA to its membership of over 350 corporate companies, session five focussed on the number one sourcing concern as voted by them – ‘Establishing true value from outsourcing’.
Using case studies and results from the recently commissioned NOA research with Kingston Business School on “The economic benefit of outsourcing and shared services to the United Kingdom”, session five discussed the true value of outsourcing with a panel of sourcing experts who took questions from the floor as well as via a live twitter feed.
Michael Stock chaired the session along with key speakers including Stephanie Morgan, Kingston Business School; Sam Saghiri, Cranfield University; Bharat Vagadia, Op2i and NOA Board Member; Phil Taylor, Stratchclyde University; and Ian Bolger, Thames Water Managed Procurement Service.
The final session of the summit focused on collaborative working and was chaired by Adrian Quayle, Consultant and NOA Board Member. Peter Hands, Logica; and Sara Titmuss, Elexon presented a case study based on partnerships while Malcolm Robinson, Carphone Warehouse; and Jim Hemmington, BBC shared their thoughts and experience with collaborative working and took questions from the floor.
Malcolm said: “There are three main types of collaboration: process, management and commercial collaboration. Making sure there is a clear understanding of business profiling and maturity in a relationship is crucial.”
Martyn Hart closed the Summit and thanked everyone for their participation.
“Thank you to everyone for attending the Summit, it is only with the continued support of NOA members that we are able to grow, educate and support individuals in this fascinating industry.
“Over the last six years, the NOA Awards have also become a landmark in the acceptance of outsourcing as an essential business practice and recognise the efforts of companies or people who have shown excellence in the field of outsourcing. We look forward to seeing you all in the future and I wish all nominees the best of luck for this evening’s ceremony.”
For a full list of all presentations, please see the NOA site.
www.noa.co.uk