Industry news

The Cooperative Financial Services (CFS) has announced a partnership with the National Outsourcing Association (NOA) for its supplier management development programme. The news follows the recent announcement by the NOA of their partnership with HML part of the Skipton Building Society.

The CFS programme, known as The Professional Certificate in Outsourcing Practice, has been designed to develop participants’ ability to apply best practice principles to the management of business relationships. Structured as a blend of workshops and distance learning, the course is accredited at undergraduate degree level by Middlesex University, and can be tailored to meet the individual needs of specific organisations.

The CFS Sourcing Forum has established the programme in order to develop the skills of colleagues who are involved in the management of suppliers of outsourced and shared services operations. The Certificate is awarded by the NOA, the UK’s only outsourcing trade association and the center of excellence in outsourcing.

“The course has been designed to explain the basic concepts of outsourcing and introduces the NOA Life-cycle framework for best practice in outsourcing,” said Steve Briggs, Head of Strategic Partnerships at the Co-operative Financial Services. "As outsourced business underpins our ability to deliver a high quality service to customers it is essential we have expertise in managing those relationships. The Professional Certificate is an important part of helping us achieve that."

Course participants have recently completed Gateway, the first of three modules that make up the Professional Certificate in Outsourcing Practice. Of the 12 course participants, nearly half have submitted work of a standard which should put them well onto the road to achieve a merit or distinction once they have completed the programme.

Martyn Hart, Chairman of the National Outsourcing Association (NOA), commented: “The NOA is delighted with the progress of the group and impressed by the level of commitment the 12 individuals have demonstrated. The programme is clearly helping them to develop their practice and to ensure that they are all able to manage supplier relationships to ensure optimum performance for CFS.”

The group will continue with module 2 of the Professional Certificate; which enables them to explore approaches to outsourcing in more detail. Module 2 will be completed before the end of 2010 with the NOA Professional Certificate itself awarded in early Spring 2011.

HP Enterprise Services today announced it has been awarded a $20 million contract by the State of Florida’s Agency for Workforce Innovation to develop, design, implement and maintain the Early Learning Information System (ELIS) for the enhancement of the state’s early learning programs.

ELIS is a consolidated information system that manages the early learning programs used by 300,000 Florida families whose children attend the Voluntary Prekindergarten Education and School Readiness programs.

Under this applications services contract, HP will develop and implement a centralized child care management system. To achieve this, HP will deliver applications development and modernization services to provide enhanced system functionality, such as improved attendance tracking, provider payment processing, case management, eligibility determination and reporting.

“The creation of Florida’s Early Learning Information System will result in significant improvements to the way we are able to manage the state’s early learning programs,” said Brittany Birken, director, Florida’s Office of Early Learning. “This system will provide real-time information that will improve the accessibility, affordability and the quality of early learning services for Florida’s children and families.”

The new system will enable data sharing capabilities between educators, parents, providers and state agencies. HP will implement online self-service customer portals to improve customer service and ELIS accessibility for parents and providers to gain access to child development resources, early education information and referral information.

In addition, the system will assist with the identification of fraud and overpayments as well as streamline administrative processes by serving as the single point of entry for eligibility data. In support of Florida’s caseworkers, ELIS will offer increased efficiency by creating automated, repeatable and predictable processes.

“We look forward to assisting Florida with development of ELIS to enable the state to gain operational efficiencies while providing quality, inclusive early learning opportunities for children from birth through age five,” said Dennis Stolkey, senior vice president, U.S. Public Sector, HP Enterprise Services. “HP is proud to extend our 19-year relationship with the State’s Agency for Workforce Innovation by delivering best-in-class technical, functional and management expertise.”

Source:http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2010/100929a.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

Capitalising on the uptake in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Inatech, the Oracle business solutions specialist, has created a new ECM team.

The ECM team of experienced consultants, who have many man years working with ECM solutions, will focus on core Oracle solutions including the Oracle UCM suite, Universal Content Management and the I/PM product set. This will enable customers, including commercial and Government organisations, to capture and manage documents that are integrated with Siebel and Oracle’s E-Business applications.

The team will be led by industry veteran Andrew Coyle, ECM Business Development Manager at Inatech, who has 20 years experience helping multinationals and Governments with information management strategies.

Andrew commented: “As information and document management is becoming increasingly important and complex for organisations to master, ECM is a vital strategic asset for any IT department. The time is right for clients to remove complexity, strip out duplication and utilise the opportunities promised by their technology and the intelligence presented by their collective data.”

Chris Baker, CEO at Inatech commented: “Today’s business environment is representing new challenges and opportunities for global enterprises. As such, it’s imperative to manage costs and ensure the business remains competitive and efficient.

“One of the key opportunities is savings within document and paper-based processes. Oracle’s processing and scanning technologies are essential for this and that’s why we have created a dedicated ECM team to enable our clients to gain maximum benefit.”

As part of Oracle E20 suite, the IPM product set automates paper intensive business processes by coupling capture and imaging technology with workflow. It’s fully integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite and provides a framework that allows organisations to take advantage of the high volume imaging and workflow capabilities from Oracle.

Source:http://www.inatech.com/practices/ecm.asp

Forecasts by independent technology analyst Ovum reveal that growth will slow to just 2% in 2011, down from 2.4% in 2010. Once inflation is taken into account then the market will actually shrink.

Jessica Hawkins, Ovum analyst, said: “The IT services market was severely affected by the global financial crisis with growth dropping to just 1.6% in 2009, but the sector’s woes are far from over. The slow recovery and drastic public sector cuts have crushed any hopes of a return to better days and 2011 will be extremely tough for the industry.”

Public sector IT spend has already been affected by the moratorium on £1 million+ IT projects and earlier this month the National Programme for IT was effectively scrapped. Hawkins said: “A reduction in IT spend will be accelerated further following the spending review on 20 October, which is expected to deliver cuts of anywhere between 25% and 40%. The public sector faces its toughest year for a decade and will only grow by 2% in 2011. Suppliers should only expect single digit growth for the next few years.”

Although in general the picture for IT services companies looks bleak in 2011, according to Hawkins, providers of business process outsourcing (BPO) stand to benefit significantly from the new age of austerity. She said: “We expect BPO to be largely resilient to this tough environment as public sector departments try to deal with the cuts. It will therefore remain the fastest-growing sector of the UK IT services market through to 2015, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.5 per cent.”

Source: http://www.ovumkc.com/

The bill dubbed the “Creating American Jobs and End Offshoring Act” was voted on Tuesday with disastrous results for the supporters of the act. This legislation intended to create tax breaks for the companies that moved overseas operations back to the U.S., but took tax breaks away from the companies that continued, or started to rely on overseas production. There were yea’s and nay’s from both political parties, so this time, the Republicans didn’t filibuster. I somehow believe though, that if the Democrats had stuck together on this that it would have happened.

Democrat’s Reactions

All but four Democrats voted for the bill, The line crossers were Senators Ben Nelson (Neb,) Max Baucus (Mon,) Jon Tester (Mon,) and Mark Warner (Vi.) One independent joined the group, Senator Joe Lieberman (Conn.). While the loss was expected, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said “The bill we tried to pass today is based on simple common sense: to keep American jobs here in America, we should stop forcing taxpayers in Nevada and across the nation to pay for giveaways that reward companies for sending American jobs overseas.” Democrats knew of the party defections Monday, and hushed acknowledgment was evident.

Republican Thoughts

Republicans said that the bill would kill job creation by taxing the companies and that this was an election maneuver to gain votes. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said “Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the majority is showing how desperate they are with a bill that increases the tax burden on job creators and ship much-needed U.S. jobs overseas.” He also said that the measure was “irresponsible” and would not serve to aid in the economic recovery.

Payroll Tax Exemption, Yahoo

The bill had a payroll exemption provision for the companies that moved jobs back onto U.S. soil, and a tax deferral on income from subsidiaries was killed in it. Looking at the proposal in its entirety, I cannot see how these provisions would serve to do what the “No” voters say it would, but then, that’s just this American workers opinion.

Source:http://www.usmoneytalk.com/finance/unemployment-and-economics-outsourcing-bill-killed-in-the-senate-909/

Research published today by ContactBabel, the contact centre industry analysts, reveals that the past 2 years has seen a 440% increase in the number of complaints about the failures and shortcomings of UK banks. In real terms, this means a jump from almost 2.8m negative calls in 2008 to over 12.2m in 2010.

However, it is not the case that the performance or quality of banks' contact centre staff has declined: the proportion of complaints directed at the failings of the contact centre's staff has reduced from 21% to 14% in that same timescale, with the vast and growing majority of customer complaints being about the workings and processes of the bank itself (up from 79% in 2008 to 86% in 2010).

Generally, the recession has driven more consumers to display negativity, stress and intolerance of mistakes, as well as there being general under-investment by companies, which has worsened the problems with the business processes that cause many of these complaints. Negative feelings towards financial services institutions, and specific issues around bank charges and the fall-out of the credit crunch have created many very unhappy customers who are now far more prone to complain than had previously been the case.

"The UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide (8th edition - 2010)", is a major study of over 200 UK contact centre operations, looking at all areas of contact centre performance, investment, technology, HR and strategy. This year, it is available entirely free of charge from http://www.contactbabel.com.

The report's author, Steve Morrell, commented:

"It is no surprise the finance and banking sector comes out of this worst-off. In 2008, only 1.2% of calls made to banks were complaints - in 2010, that figure had increased by more than seven-fold to 8.5%. However, as the overall number of calls to banks' UK contact centres has diminished since 2008, due to an increase in self-service and offshore support, the actual number of complaints has not risen by quite as much, although a 440% increase is certainly cause for alarm.

"Across every business sector - not just the banks - the vast amount of complaints received by a contact centre are not about how the staff handle calls, but rather about a failure of processes elsewhere in the organisation. However, it's the contact centre that has to deal with the dirty work, and further failures within the complaints and resolutions procedure (or lack of it) can see customers calling into the contact centre again and again, becoming more irate each time, despite the real problem lying outside the contact centre.

"There is a real risk, especially within large contact centres and in those that operate offshore as well as in the UK, that a single agent does not have the capability or responsibility to deal with the customer’s issue. It may be that various internal departments (e.g. finance, billing, provisioning and technical support), need to work together to resolve the issue, but in many businesses, getting someone to take responsibility for sorting out the problem is a long and complex process in itself.

"This widespread and short-sighted failure of businesses to see the contact centre as part of a larger organic whole is the main reason that many people dislike using contact centres: too often, agents are simply not given the tools they need to solve the customer's problem."

Source: http://www.contactbabel.com/reports.cfm

The number of businesses in the United States and other countries that have outsourced jobs to India has been staggering. One of the main reasons behind this growing trend is the number of talented workers in India who are performing business tasks for a mere fraction of what they would cost in the West. Price is not the only factor. There are many other reasons why India is the prime choice for outsourcing.

The English Language

Due to British colonization, many Indians can speak fluent English. This is one big advantage that other Asian countries don’t have. No intepreters are required, there are fewer misunderstandings and business communication can flow freely. This is why the call center industry has exploded in India. Customers calling from Canada, the United States and Britain can make inquiries and voice their concerns with ease. Despite the use of different idioms, Westerners generally don’t have to worry that the person on the other end of the line will be speaking in an unintelligible language.

Highly Educated Workforce

The Indians have proven themselves to be quite adept at developing software, and the quality of the work is being recognized as meeting acceptable international standards. Western companies are also finding the Indians useful for performing other tasks relating to financial reports, accounting, tax processing, photo editing services and more. Computer literacy among Indian workers is high and this is what gives the country a leg up on the competition. Universities are adding more graduates to the pool of skilled workers each year and seeing as they are young, they can adapt to change more easily.

More Open to Doing Business

Up until reforms began in 1991, India was seen as an almost impossible market to crack. The License Raj was put in place after independence in 1947, and the rules were so confusing and hard to navigate that it’s no wonder the country’s economic progress was minimal. Indian leaders knew they would be in serious trouble unless they made some big changes quickly. Today, foreign investors are coming back to India in droves. Companies that were once prohibited from setting up operations are being allowed to enter the market. India’s legal system has been influenced by the British colonialists and Western businesspeople feel more comfortable in this type of environment.

A Matter of Geography

India is located in a rather convenient time zone. At about the same time as American workers are heading home, the Indians are waking up. Somebody in the U.S. who can’t work late can send jobs that need to be finished to India. By the next morning, they will be completed. This is great for productivity, because the work continues and fewer tasks are overlooked.

Source:http://lindazengyuanqun.typepad.com/blog/2010/09/reasons-why-india-is-a-favorite-outsourcing-hub-.html

The University of the Arts London (UAL) is to overhaul its ICT infrastructure in a bid to deliver and maintain a “truly agile” desktop infrastructure.

UAL, the largest arts university in Europe, has become the first institution on this side of the Atlantic to sign up to the new Citrix Campus Agreement in the process, which will allow for greater desktop flexibility across its six Colleges.

The University has worked alongside ICT consultancy firm Centralis in developing the strategy, which will include the ability to deliver and maintain a single desktop/application to multiple devices across multiple locations including an ever increasing Apple Mac community where the users can subscribe to the applications they need.

“The University has been investigating various methods of delivering desktops and applications from a central point, but was unsure whether this would be best suited using VDI, TS, physical or a mix,” says Adam Atkinson, desktop manager at University of the Arts London. “The time required to fully assess the different solutions and technologies was a daunting prospect knowing that one delivery method would not suit all of our users. We can now focus on how best to deliver the applications and desktops rather than worrying about the licensing requirements for each technology.”

Patricia Reid, IT Support Manager, Central Services and Licensing at University of the Arts London added, “It has taken the HE education sector nearly five years to achieve this agreement through discussions with Citrix, EduServe and UCISA to make it more cost effective for us to license our Citrix environment. UAL have been working with Centralis and Citrix for a few years now with a view to one day having a Campus wide licence and now it is here there was no doubt in my mind that we will make use of it as it will be more cost effective for the University.”

The new licensing model is based on a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) count of both students and staff at a fixed price, and includes unlimited access campus-wide, work at home rights and flexible subscription benefits. Under the terms of the agreement, UAL will be able to fully utilise several Citrix technologies, including XenDesktop 4 and EdgeSight, a real-time system-monitoring tool, and further leverage previous investment in the Citrix Access Gateway.

Signing the Agreement comes ahead of a planned move for one campus, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, to new premises in Kings Cross, which is expected to take place next year. UAL is hoping to introduce thin client devices in the new building and will be covered for this under the terms of the Campus Agreement.

Alex Weeks, IT Systems Manager at University of the Arts London says, “Our aim is always to streamline and improve our IT provision for staff and students. The Campus Agreement allows us access to the latest technology at a fixed price point, essential from our point of view as an educational establishment.”

“We have worked with Centralis to deploy Citrix products for a number of years and have positive feedback from staff already using the Access Gateway product. It also allows us to plan for the future expansion to the student body and development of a new location.”

Ewen Anderson, managing director at Centralis says, “University of the Arts London is made up of some of the most renowned art colleges in the world and Centralis is proud to have been working with them for the last seven years to increase both the quality and reach of their IT solutions. Given the challenges of the move and requirement to deliver services to multiple colleges across London, it is no surprise to see them being the first to take advantage of the new licensing and it will certainly help to minimise disruption for staff and students.”

Source: http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/education/uni-arts-london-overhaul-ict-infrastructure

The impact of the October cuts may be more severe than anticipated in the public sector because there are insufficient ICT staff with the right skills to salvage the situation through better use of technology to preserve front-line service delivery at reduced expenditure.

That was the pessimistic view of some experts talking at last week's 360 Degree IT event in London, who fret there are too few IT entry-level people coming into the sector with the optimal mix of business and hi-tech savvy.

Some 150,000 people a year are recruited to the UK IT sector per year, education consultant with the Open University Tim Rault-Smith told the audience - but 40% of British employers say the level of business, non-technical and interpersonal skills of new entrants to be disappointing.

That's a problem if the Coalition's aims to make huge cuts from Government is matched by improved efficiencies in performance at both central and local government level, he said. Staff will need to hit the ground running in a very tough environment, he went on – pointing out that CBI data suggests some 62% of new IT entrants need to draw on business skills almost immediately they are in post.

“There's a gap between the skills new people come to the industry with and what they need from day one,” he concluded.

His University is one of several trying to work with the Sector Skills Council for Business and Information Technology, e-Skills UK, to provide a top-up qualification that could beef up new IT professional's business capability – the proposed e-Skills Professional Programme.

Things like this could also be useful for helping employees currently in IT “who are trapped by a glass ceiling” and frustrated they are unable break out into wider business management, Rault-Smith suggested.

Source: http://www.publictechnology.net/sector/central-gov/cuts-will-bite-worse-ict-people-will-struggle-talk-business

Transport giant FirstGroup has awarded a range of IT contracts to Atos Origin and Computacenter, for IT support, IT user service desk, email management and datacentres and hosting at its UK operations. FirstGroup, the UK's largest bus and train operator, let contracts worth £36.2 million in total. The largest is a £11.8 million, five-year contract for datacentre and hosting, which has been won by Atos Origin.

Under the terms of this contract, Atos will host and support a number of FirstGroup’s IT systems – a mix of Wintel, Linux and Unix environments. The supplier will also host the related LAN and SAN infrastructure, with both physical and virtualised infrastructure expected to be provided. The systems will include back office applications, engineering systems and front office ticketing systems. FirstGroup said that some of the IT systems will require disaster recovery to a second active data centre. In addition, Atos Origin will provide managed email and collaborative services for up to 20,000 mailboxes as part of a five-year, £2.1 million contract. This will include email, instant messaging, calendar and mobile messaging services.

Meanwhile, under a five-year, £8.2 million IT support contract, Computacenter will provide IT support and technical delivery of FirstGroup’s distributed infrastructure. This will include management support of the company’s 10,000 end user devices, servers and LAN infrastructure across 630 sites in the UK.

Computacenter will also supply an ITIL-based IT service desk to handle all first line calls from FirstGroup’s end users, and the required infrastructure to handle the company’s IT service requests, as part of a five-year £5.9 million contract. The service desk will support service requests for back office systems, personal productivity systems and rail and bus-specific operational systems. In an additional contract, FirstGroup awarded a £8.2 million, 44-month contract to Global Crossing Telecommunications for the supply, operation and support of its Wide Area Network in the UK.

The network will be required to support all types of data, including voice. While the network will initially cover all the company’s sites, the Global Crossing may have to expand its services to Europe and North America, as required. Earlier this year, FirstGroup signed a multi-million pound application development, installation and support contract with Atos Origin.

Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3241204/firstgroup-picks-atos-origin-computacenter-and-global-crossing/