Phil F.

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Are prices really dropping, or are services merely being disaggregated?

Phil F. posted an article on - Dec 4, 2009, 10:19 am
One of the advisors which has really made a strong move in the sourcing business this year is Alsbridge. Much of that has been down to its strong track record with clients, but its also made some cann...
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Simply Lowell (Part I)

Phil F. posted an article on - Dec 1, 2009, 7:01 pm
Lowell, quite simply, is the most respected practitioner in HR Outsourcing. Not only has he spent many years as an actual HR leader, he also worked for the "original" HRO provider Exult, moved into t...
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Complete our survey. Now

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 25, 2009, 1:29 pm
Before you tuck into your Thanksgiving turkey and guzzle a gallon of bad quality Chardonnay, please take 10 minutes to complete our industry-wide study entitled "The New Normal in Outsourcing Delivery...
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Can IT overcome its credibility crisis?

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 21, 2009, 3:13 pm
There's little doubt about what's been providing the rocket-fuel behind the rebounding services business: IT outsourcing. Simply put, there are plenty of eager providers to choose between, the...
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Xerox-ACS: Cloud Services Potential, or Dinosaurs Huddling Together for Warmth?

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 18, 2009, 1:28 pm
Our recent discussion on Xerox's acquisition of ACS certainly served up some meaty discussion, and even got picked up by CIO.com, among other media. My dear friend, and former colleague at AMR Res...
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Eulogizing on the Eurozone with Principal Euan

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 13, 2009, 2:11 pm
Attend any European analyst meeting and there’s one character guaranteed to be propping up the bar. Scratch that, there are normally about 50 analysts propping up the bar. But in the midst of the th...
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The "new normal" in the outsourcing delivery business

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 7, 2009, 12:17 pm
This truly has been a pivotal quarter for the outsourcing business. As we've discussed several times here, many services contract decisions have been delayed during the economic crisis while organ...
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Taking a walk on the Wacki side...

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 4, 2009, 8:00 am
If there’s one person who’s been a consistent figure closely tied to the development of Finance and Accounting sourcing over the last decade, it’s Paul Nowacki (or to those of us know him, simpl...
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Reminder: stop and smell the roses

Phil F. posted an article on - Nov 2, 2009, 12:00 pm
Sometimes life becomes a converged morass of email, reading, writing, number-crunching, slideware-designing, talking, selling, firefighting, and so on - and more so these days than ever. Noone has tim...
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Randomly shout into the darkness and hope someone's listening

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 31, 2009, 12:27 pm
"None of you have any friends"... this little clip about that social networking tool we know and love just cracked me up -:)
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Sitting on a shrinking business and afraid to change

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 28, 2009, 8:37 am
"Most of our managers are happy sitting on a shrinking business" bemoaned a senior executive the other day. Sound familiar? I hate to say this, but too many senior executives I talk to these days adop...
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So where next for the Galloping Hooves?

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 24, 2009, 10:53 am
"You are going to keep doing that blog aren't you?" seems to have been the most frequently-asked question I've had since I changed my day-job. And a few people have asked whether I can still c...
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Efstathiou uncut: all aboard with the sourcing skipper

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 18, 2009, 2:21 pm
When I returned to these Western shores 6 years' ago, I was given the the unenviable task of working with the indomitable Andy Efstathiou. Now, analysts who have spent 20 years working in commerci...
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Why I joined Cognizant

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 14, 2009, 6:35 pm
Folks - Having spent 14 years on the analyst and advisory side of the sourcing industry, it's a natural move for me to join a service provider - for both professional and personal reasons. Having ...
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Business and friendship: it's all about professional respect

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 11, 2009, 1:02 pm
You can't understate the importance of relationships in business - especially sourcing, where it's all about cultural fit and working relationships. In business, it's not always about liki...
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Consulting the Oracle: Tibor's talktrack (Part II)

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 8, 2009, 7:26 am
In the second-part of this two-part interview, Oracle's Tibor Beles discusses how service providers can be successful at platform-BPO offerings, how the broader BPO industry can improve, in additi...
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Consulting the Oracle: Tibor's talktrack (Part I)

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 6, 2009, 6:40 pm
We've had a number of discussions with some of the SAP executives over the last few years regarding its highly-publicized BPO partner-program. Meanwhile, there's been a crack Oracle team quiet...
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Stop Press: meaningful use of Twitter discovered

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 4, 2009, 11:19 am
Just as I was about to close down my Twitter account, I discovered a perfect use for the tool:
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Insecurity is the modern corporate disease

Phil F. posted an article on - Oct 3, 2009, 10:50 am
In 1597, Sir Francis Bacon coined the famous phrase "Knowledge is Power". While knowledge does create power to the beholder of that knowledge, it can rarely be harnessed effectively until is it shared...
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Bittersweet

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 30, 2009, 3:38 pm
As many of you close to me already know, after 14 years in the analyst and management consulting community, I am going to take a little break and make a few changes. I'd like to thank publicly AMR...
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Xerox copies Dell's example and acquires ACS, but again, where's the fit?

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 28, 2009, 7:54 am
Is there a recurring theme here? US-based giants with faltering commodity business models from yesteryear, making very late plays to get into the IT-BPO services business? While I could see some syner...
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Forget Platform BPO, it's really about the Business Services Cloud (Part II)

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 27, 2009, 11:07 am
We inspired a lot of offline debate when we discussed the challenges facing BPO providers delivering so-called "Platform BPO" solutions. Bottom-line, if BPO service providers are competing for commodi...
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Swine Flu can impact your service levels

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 24, 2009, 7:21 am
If you wake up looking like this... Don't go to work!
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Scale the peaks of FAO... in Tampa

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 22, 2009, 9:43 am
As a wise man once told me, "there's nothing quite like visiting Tampa in late October". Many years on, his prophecy is coming true, with the second annual North American "FAO Summit", being held ...
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The Dell finally tolls - but is this the right fit?

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 21, 2009, 7:17 am
So Dell finally made its major play into the IT services enterprise arena announcing a $3.9bn deal for the Texas-based Perot Systems. Unlike the HP/EDS mega-merger of last year, there is a lot less ov...
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The art of blog: credibility is in the eye of the beholder

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 18, 2009, 6:21 pm
Mark Stelzner roused some passions last week with a great blog post discussing how some traditional media are highlighting the need to regulate bloggers with possible "conflicts of interest". For exam...
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Stephanie Moore's Law

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 15, 2009, 7:38 pm
One of the most prominent industry analysts in sourcing over the last decade-plus has been Stephanie Moore. Steph started out at Gartner, before spending time at Giga, and most recently Forrester Rese...
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Derail the Healthcare gravy-train: introduce competitive multi-sourcing

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 11, 2009, 10:52 am
Being a relatively recent immigrant to US society, it's fascinating to observe the political games corporations and politicians play to reach their desired outcomes. What I find a little absurd is...
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Forget Platform BPO, it's really about the Business Services Cloud (Part I)

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 9, 2009, 10:07 am
The recession has upped the ante for today's BPO providers: the move to providing business services in a cloud-like model is accelerating, and the real challenge for today's service providers ...
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Join the world's largest social-networking sourcing community

Phil F. posted an article on - Sep 6, 2009, 4:22 pm
Yes, there is such a thing as a free lunch... Horses For Sources' official LinkedIn Group, the aptly-named "BPO and Offshoring Best Practices Forum" now has 7,000 members. This is a forum for lead...
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Mixing it with the big boys: A Tea-interval with Tiger

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 31, 2009, 2:56 pm
Not too many service providers have had a bigger impact on the world of Business Process Outsourcing in recent years than General Electric’s former offshore captive, Genpact. And much of this rapid ...
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Facebook: the twenty-to-one rule

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 29, 2009, 9:09 am
I just read yet another media article, this time in the WSJ, on the downsides of using social media tools such as Facebook. While the theme of this article is spot-on, it's merely journalistic neg...
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New-age influence peddling: Ray and Jeremiah join Charlene's Angels

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 27, 2009, 10:25 am
After our little debate the other day about who is influencing decision-makers these days, I found Ray Wang's new career move worth mentioning... Ray's joined former Forrester Research "rock s...
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The entire Great Recession of 2008-2009: Blogged for the outsourcing industry

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 25, 2009, 11:35 am
Wouldn't it had been something if there had been some sort of interactive journal during the Great Depression, where we could have truly experienced the emotions of the time, peoples' ideas fo...
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So who's peddling "influence" these days?

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 24, 2009, 9:57 pm
Prolific blogster and all-round industry pundit Vinnie Mirchandani asks whether the IIAR's definition of the analyst is outdated. He also begs the question whether my good friend Ray Wang, who has...
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The future of the sourcing industry: DNA and industry knowledge trump scale

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 17, 2009, 9:02 am
I spent much of last week at InsofysBPO's customer summit in Baltimore. Infy always does a good job with their events - they bring their customers together and encourage open, unstructured debate,...
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Crash and Learn: is TPI's "quartus horribilis" reflective of the sourcing industry at large?

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 12, 2009, 9:41 am
There were a few alarm-bells ringing in the outsourcing industry with TPI's shaky Q2 results. As our recent buy-side survey data indicates, in addition to the multitude of service providers and co...
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Introducing new-age BPO: the standardization/personalization balance

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 6, 2009, 1:53 pm
The new wave of BPO deployment has arrived quicker than many of us anticipated. The recession has driven some common-sense into a BPO value-proposition that was previously centered predominantly on so...
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The Alamo comes to HR Tech... get your front row seats here

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 5, 2009, 5:55 pm
Anyone from the world of HR, who cares about the impact technology has on their existence, is congregating at the infamous HR Technology show in Chicago on September 30-October 2, hosted by the legend...
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Is this a good climate to take a career "risk"? Or is it riskier staying where you are?

Phil F. posted an article on - Aug 2, 2009, 11:18 am
My definition of corporate failure in this market: "We're gonna ride out 2009 and go for it next year." What are you going for? What are you riding out? If you want to remain successful, you bette...
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