Landed Staff vs Local Staff

One of the big differences in the delivery and staffing model of offshored based providers against traditional onshore based providers is the use of landed staff. Aside of the whole issue around immigration and its impact on economy which has been widely discussed, these present an interesting contrast in operating model --- the landed resources are almost certainly working from client premises and are more connected to IT teams by sheer physical proximity. The local in-country staff may not always be in-premise all the time which impacts their connect.

Also, since the landed staff is in the country only for that work, and are more culturally tuned to the offshore based teams, they often have a not so busy social life which along with the work culture they are mostly tuned to, end up working more in terms of sheer hours.

There are several other interesting aspects that I have seen at closed range as I have worked in both models and will discuss those in some future posts.

CSAT Programs for Outsourced IT Services

Enterprises and service providers alike have not been able to find a consistent way to really tap into the the user perception of IT services that are outsourced to external providers. There are only a handful of them who have a well oiled framework to regular mine feedback from users of outsourced IT services, siphoning it back to the delivery teams and tracking the progress against the areas of improvement. Even there, the process is at best reactive. 

There are several variants of doing this but a lack of a consistent framework stands out --- and is so surprising that no one has really been making moves across the industry in this space, moreso with the growing trend of moving work to several countries outside the base country, multi-sourcing and other emerging trends which adds several moving parts to what was earlier a simple support model with in-house and mostly local IT support.

In most IT shops where CSAT programs run, these are mostly around service desk where a % of users whose tickets are closed are served with a 5-8 question survey to gather feedback on that experience. However there is need to include resolver groups in this or separately and also to track trends of root causes and teams scoring lower scores consistently. However this is mostly the B2C kind of CSAT if you may. The other is the qualitative feedback on a provider's ability to deliver the intended goals, service improvement and support for business which are more of the B2B kind of CSAT. These are more crucial to gather what the customer leadership team thinks of the provider and are most often modulated due to the "in-band" nature of information gathering. The teams which collect such information are part of the account relationship team and have a conflict of interest in collecting such feedback on performance which reflects their own. Also, it is not easy to standardize such B2B CSAT feedback as each client has its own unique set of requirements.

An ideal CSAT program covers both B2C and B2B CSAT feedback and analyzes these and finds trends to assess how the services are trending. A great area to improve and grow for both enterprises and service providers alike.

This news article has pegged UK as the second largest IT outsourcing market after the US:

The government has put a huge FOR SALE sign over the country’s public assets and services. According to the sharedserviceslink.com website, the bulletin board for “leaders in finance shared services”, the United Kingdom is the world’s largest out-sourcing market after the United States. The number of contracts in the UK has increased sharply by 47 per cent to 148 contracts a year since 2010. The annual contract value for this country jumped 16 per cent in 2012 to $3.75 billion! All this before the major sale drive about to take placein the NHS.

The International Services Group (ISG) states that the UK accounted for 80 per cent of all contracting out across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, making our government alone among the major European economies in using out-sourcing  as a key element in its response to austerity. Richard Vize, ofOutsourcer Eye, says that the application of cuts is dominated by “short-term thinking”. The effects of all this activity on quality or cost is unclear and there is no reliable information on the impact of cuts or out-sourcing – though these effects are visible, for example, in local government, the NHS and government agencies such as the Inland Revenue.

While EMEA was always considered the second largest ground, UK taking that cake on the back of a strong government driven initiative speaks of the growing importance of the country in the global marketplace. While the scale and growth rate are still lower than that of US, this demonstrates the prominence of the region not just in the European context but overall in the global IT market context.