As offshore outsourcing fulfills its promise of lower labor costs, we are seeing the bar rising. Now providers are expected to provide Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). This relatively new term refers to the emerging standards of BPO personnel to include smart management and flexible problem-solving.
Static BPO is like hiring a room full of robots who slavishly perform a task without thought. Dynamic BPO (KPO) refers to the standard of having this room filled with knowledgeable personnel who think about what they are doing, can see problems as they arise, and can react on their feet to create solutions. It is this growth-extension of standards that separates the automatons from people: after all that's what people are supposed to be able to do better than machines: learn and think.
Companies outsource to an offshore provider to save money; but, no one wants to trade service level excellence for cheap prices or propagation of mistakes day after day. The gold standard was to exceed in-house service levels while reducing transaction costs-now it is to create processes that can change, evolve, adapt.
The Total Cost to Offshore (TCO) ought to be one side of the coin you use in deciding on an offshore business partner.
But buyer beware applies to offshoring and decision makers need to understand the hidden costs inherent in the use of an offshore provider.
Our promise is to make sure you understand the TCO in complete detail. We promise to take the excitement out of add-ons, hidden costs, and other "gotchas" of doing business offshore. We have a policy of up-front negotiations, done with our management team, whose mantra is explain, explain, explain-because we like to survive and thrive and because we think it is good business-which always pays off in the long term.
Our shop is managed by peoplewho are trained in the discipline of modern Western Project Management, which holds, in a nutshell, that people who aremanaged well, perform well.
We ask you to consider the real cost of late IT projects that languish because no one took the initiative to get in there and find out why it has slowed down. Consider the real cost of partially fulfilled IT projects, in which mistakes abound and code is undocumented. Consider also the real cost of IT projects that don't perform like you want them to. Most of the time, that is a communication issue that could have been avoided with the willingness (and ability) to communicate with the client.
Service level quality at or above in-house levels is the other side of the coin you need to see. It is never good enough to be just good enough. Excellence requires high performance at all levels, from management to the code warrior, to the telephone crew who field so many challenging questions.
Any company who claims to equal or better existing service levels ought to put their money where their mouth is. That's what we do at iCatchIT. Performance metrics are an important part of our Service Level Agreement (SLA); nothing else makes sense.
Deciding where to offshore should not involve the toss of a coin. You can do better by knowing the total cost of doing business and the inevitable Service Level challenges you'll be facing. That takes careful planning and due diligence. But that's what business survival (and iCatchIT) is all about, after all.
Congratulations to the developers and PR team on a great show. Many customers were impressed with our advanced web development demonstration.
