“Process is their product,” declares Phil Gilbert about third party BPO operations. After his visit to India, where he had gone to meet his IT partner, Tata Consultancy Services and to open a new TCS-Lombardi Insurance Solutions Lab in Bangalore, Gilbert has come back mighty impressed with the Indian service providers.
Explaining the intricate (and hitherto missed) link between BPM and outsourcing, Gilbert says, “a great outsourcer may be better at quickly improving your business than you are because these companies have the cultural maturity required for BPM that eludes even the most progressive companies in the world.”
In this context, he cites a recent McKinsey research, according to which cultural maturity is the single biggest contributor to implementing change in any organization. In 2008, the McKinsey survey of 3,199 global executives found that only one transformation in three succeeds and the reason fro this is lack of cultural compatibility between various stakeholders. However when process becomes a product --- as it does for well-structured, well-accounted BPO operations, the result is pure alchemy.
Here, Gilbert hurries to explain that outsourcing deals also fail and even lead to worse processes (as they often have in the past), but increasing competition is now forcing process improvement even in India.
During his visit, he learned that increasingly deals are being assessed for their process outcomes (SLA's, KPI's) over the life of an offshore contract. In fact, in today’s scenario, there can be no BPO, without BPM, insists Gilbert.
“More and more companies are beginning to understand that business is change and when that's the case, process becomes your product,” he concludes.
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