Who needs the baggage?
The word “outsourcing” comes with a lot of baggage. People fondly remember a time when they would call their bank and someone they knew would pick up the phone and immediately get to work on resolving whatever issue was at hand. And then these same call centers were relocated overseas and everything started to fall apart. Voilà, "outsourcing" and all the associated issues people have with it came into being.
In the years since technology outsourcing started really taking off, the practice has changed as rapidly as the technology supporting it. No longer do strategic outsourcers simply focus on lowering their costs by replacing local employees with cheaper labor in developing countries. Rather, many outsourcers today have decoupled the concept of outsourcing from offshoring and instead provide “Smart Shoring” solutions.
By its very nature, Smart Shoring has a different goal in mind: the client. In an interesting blend of onshore technical expertise front ending offshore delivery, innovative companies today provide an outsourced service at scale and with quality. The benefits of such an approach are extremely valuable financially, and it is important for the modern enterprise to consider these types of arrangements with key vendors as they themselves seek to optimize their costs while improving the quality of their own service delivery.
In the competitive market that Highmetric operates in, we’ve interacted with many clients who have little-to-no interest in hearing about outsourcing. Then there are the converts who swear by Highmetric Managed Services for ServiceNow Administration and the tremendous value it has yielded for their businesses. The cognitive leap that these clients have made is that outsourcing is not an all or nothing proposition but rather a tool to be used to solve a specific organizational problem.
All this talking about shoring...
In some of the most successful cases, Highmetric has engaged with clients who are looking to maximize their own internal employees' time. By offloading more rote tasks like data administration, user management, group management, etc., to a smart-shored Managed Service, clients' employees gain back more valuable time to innovate on the platform they're tasked to build on, namely ServiceNow. In other words, our clients have seen success by leveraging Managed Services as an opportunity to gain productivity and enhance internal innovation as opposed to down sizing their workforce.
When companies switch on Managed Services within their organizations, there is an immediate shift of internal priorities, and thus upward pressure on an organization's domain maturity. Rather than spending 80% of time (industry standard) managing current-state, and 20% building toward future-state, companies use closer to 100% of their operational spend on innovation and transformative tasks.
For example, one Highmetric client who has implemented ServiceNow Notify no longer worries about maintaining that integration point or the lower level configuration tasks surrounding it. By offloading that small maintenance task onto a Managed Service in a cost effective fashion, this client has extended Notify's alert capabilities from standard IT-related Incident Management to interact with ServiceNow Facilities Management. Now, not only does this client have an internal Crisis Management plan (dread to think!), but they've actually underpinned it with ServiceNow's best-in-class workflow automation capabilities. In the unlikely event of an emergency, this client can now notify all of its employees in real time via text and voice to let them know what's occurring and how to proceed, and it can also validate that employees have received this notification: "Please press 1 to confirm your receipt of this message."
Incredibly, this innovation came about because internal focus was taken off of the task of management, and sharply refocused on innovation. Perhaps – who knows – lives will be saved as a result.