Outsource Magazine

News that on Wednesday 10 February 2010, KenCall, the up and coming outsource service provider and call centre in Kenya, hosted senior officials from Singapore suggests not only that Africa is a growing outsource destination but also that it's no longer just European and North American economies who will be calling the outsourcing tunes. According to a release about the visit, the main aim was to explore various opportunities between Singapore, KenCall and/or Kenya as an outsourcing destination in East Africa.

Whatever difficulties and challenges are currently facing African economies, history tells us that they will eventually find a way forward to the type of democratic and stable market model that has been proven to bring prosperity. On the other side of the coin, the fact that this liaison is between two places that have both been seen as outsource destinations for western businesses is yet another reminder that the days when everything in the world revolved around western economies, their needs and priorities, are fast fading.

The lesson for outsource service seekers is that you might care to spread your bets a little more in the future. As the emerging economies of the world gather their strength, the main bargaining chip for more traditional established places might be the ability to go elsewhere or even to keep the work at home. In the current issue of Outsource Magazine (issue 20, Spring 2010) we look closely at risk. At the moment, western economies are both customers and drivers for BPO services but if they relinquish the latter role and become simply customers, they'll run the risk that a cartel of service provider nations (a la OPEC) will then dictate the price the West must pay for a vital commodity - BPO service. Knowledge and its management is today what Oil was is in the 1970s and the west should not imagine that the rest of the world would not, as the oil producing nations did in the 1970s, put its interests ahead of the continuing comfortable complacency of the old order.