Outsource Magazine

Readers will be familiar with the term 'convergence' as often used when referring to the tendency of technologies to come together in single delivery packages. The most obvious and common example is the mobile 'phone which usually, these days, incorporates a camera, an mp3 player, an organiser and an address book. And then, once funtions have been packaged together there is often a move to share some of the processing and  storage technology. For instance, while a camera and a music player might take their inputs over different software platforms and create different types of files, they can share one storage system because storage doesn't care about a file's format (that's an issue for the recording, retrieval and reading software to manage) it only really cares that it is a recognisable digital file.

Business processes seem to be going down the same 'convergence route' with firms such as Capita, Capgemini and Tata beginning to leverage their relationships with clients to attract an ever wider range of operations to their outsource service. And this makes sense, especially with the growing appreciation of the Cloud and its capabilities. The Cloud might be viewed as the ultimate converged platform (although one should never say 'ultimate' because, of course, something will follow!), offering service organisations the opportunity, even more than now, to divest themselves of all but their core functions, leaving them free to concentrate on the intellectual heart of what they do, the things that differentiate them from the competition. But outsource businesses have a part to play here inasmuch as they also can help their client differentiate the service in some way that is both useful to and valued by ultimate end users. And now that costs have been pretty much beaten down to their lowest point - in some offshore outsource locations they are starting to rise again and new locations will probably not offer costs below the current levels - the next thing that BPO seekers will want is to improve the quality of their service in ways that will differentiate them from the pack.

As part of this, we may well see (it is already being discussed in some circles) a return to delivery systems that look a lot like the old 'smokestacks' that used to put process before clients. But it will not be necessary to throw Customer Relationship Management out of the window. The reality is, that with so many regulatory driven process priorities, there is a good case to be made for new smokestack like delivery conduits in which the expertise and specific regulatory knowledge necessary to meet customer expectation and avoid regulatory catastrophes become a part of each customer driven transaction but as an overlay to the transaction, not as the basis for the transaction.

This is where outsourcing really will come of age, in its ability to maintain all of the values that have made it such a successful business component while ensuring that the way its service is delivered is matched to the market and regulatory elements of each customer's relationship.