The Tipping Point for Outsourcing

"In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped."  - Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

At first, a new business venture builds from within, managing all the aspects of a small organization on its own. As a start-up grows and matures, it begins to focus energy and brain power on a strategy to maintain and support its core business, making distinctions between certain organizational functions that are integral to that strategy and those that are not. Perhaps managing the career path of a service desk analyst, for instance, has nothing to do with the overall business model. Eventually, the company recognizes that distracting leadership, management and the employee base with these types of non-core functions doesn't make sense anymore for the business.

When companies reach this point in the maturation process, they reach a tipping point – and start to view outsourcing as a strategy that allows them to better focus resources on their core business, maximizing their core competencies, while taking care of business at the same time, in an operational sense. That's when companies start talking to organizations like Bell Techlogix to manage non-core business functions externally. During these discussions, a good service provider will discuss:

• key business challenges the company faces every day
• why outsourcing makes sense for a mature company
• how an outsourcing service supports their business on an ongoing basis across all IT operations

Key Factors Influencing an Outsourcing Decision

• Cost-driven decision - Given their economic condition, some companies look at it from an expense perspective, to understand the cost-benefit analysis associated with an outsourcing model versus an in-sourcing model.
• Investment-driven decision – Others companies look at it from a capital planning perspective. Moving forward with their three- or five-year plan, where will they make investments with will help the company grow stronger?
• Strategy-driven decision – Companies that look at it from a strategic planning perspective start to understand the impact of allocating funds and resources toward functions that are not core to their business.
• Culture-driven decision – Still other companies take great pride in managing their entire business internally. Their vision for the business might be providing more jobs in the community or creating career paths and long-term employment for their staff, regardless of the cost benefit of outsourcing.

Providing First Level Response

In today's marketplace, businesses and consumers alike expect technology to work. We just expect our phones to ring, our tablets to light up and our computers to respond in less than 30 seconds, and there's no tolerance for them not doing so. The expectation and demands on our services are much higher, not just in terms of how long it takes for us to answer the phone, but the time it takes to resolve a question or deliver an answer. Not to mention, a down system. Good, bad or indifferent, it not anyone's fault; that's just the expectation.

As service providers, we've got to make sure that we are leveraging all the tools available to provide that first level response. We need to stay current with the technologies and enabling resources, such as self service and others, that ensure a customer's system is always up, always on, that it doesn't go down. We also need to work with the company on the right investments so they don't have to call us for support and experience reduced downtime.

The best metric for service provider success is not how many tickets we manage under a certain time frame; rather, it's the increase in customer productivity where we can make the most positive impact. The less the system is down, the faster and better the job gets done.

Leveraging Heartland Labor Arbitrage

There is a trend in the market today, a desire to leverage local and national resources through a domestic service delivery model versus an offshore delivery model. Why? A company's productivity is likely to be positively influenced by working with people who understand their challenges, understand their culture and understand their language; who can respond to them much more effectively and resolve their issues much quicker.

This is the thought behind heartland labor arbitrage, a new domestic service delivery model we're perfecting at Bell Techlogix, that delivers services originating from the United States at a very high level of quality combined with a very competitive total cost. In the end, we want you to choose Bell Techlogix because we have the best service, provided at the most competitive price.