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| Ravi Bapna, Executive Director, CITNE, interacting with the panellists during Multisourcing Conference |
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| Moving beyond traditional single vendors, large corporations are increasingly looking to outsource their IT needs with a multi-vendor approach. CITNE, at the ISB, organised an industry-academia meet to examine this shift from monolithic sourcing to multisourcing – the industry experience, the operational concerns, the relationship factor, challenges met, and best practices followed. |
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During an Industry-Academia Panel Discussion on ‘Multisourcing – Towards Next Generation Outsourcing’, organised at the ISB, by the Centre for Information Technology and the Networked Economy (CITNE), two interesting topics were dealt with, indepth, by an eminent panel – ‘the motivations and governance structures of multisourcing relationship, and the vendor side challenges while simultaneously competing and cooperating.’
The panellists, both from the client and vendor side, were prominently from the banking and telecom domains, and focussed on best practices, while identifying current challenges of multisourcing. Meera Sanyal, Head of Asia Services, ABN AMRO, Siva Ganesan, Global Relationship Director, TCS, Mritunjay Singh, Divisional Manager, Infosys, Abhay Kelkar, Senior Executive, Accenture, Satish HC, Associate Vice President and Divisional Manager, Infosys, V Shankar, EVP Prime Sourcing, iFlex Solutions and Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov, were some of the renowned industry faces. The panel was moderated by Professor Ravi Bapna, Executive Director, CITNE, and Professor Anitesh Barua, University of Texas at Austin.
Professor Bapna, in his inaugural address, outlined CITNE’s research involvement with various facets of multisourcing. “CITNE is developing a research agenda around issues relating to multisourcing. Our initial interest is in exploring the antecedents of successful outcome, when a client engages with multiple IT/ITES partners to achieve their business needs,” he said. |
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Sanyal presented a multisourcing vendor model, which covered the entire gamut of software, hardware, infrastructure management, telecom services, etc. She also explained about the role of the ‘guardian vendor’ and ‘relationship management,’ both crucial to multisourcing. “All multisourcing is a very simple principle of competition. If you have more banks or more providers you often get a better deal, not just better in terms of cost but also service. There is one message you can take away from all of this – apply common sense; if it works for you at the individual level, it will work at the corporate level too,” she said.
Ganesan laid stress on the need for “speed, flexibility, efficiency and agility to manage challenges in tandem, with other players.” He said that there was a need for strong global and local governance for effective multisourcing. “There are several verticals in the way business is done. I think when it comes to software services, per se, the fluidity of the service, the intangibility of the product, and the customer experience from a business side, imposes a lot of challenges on how suppliers converge together for minimal disruption from end business perspective. What that means is certainly a lot of communication,” he explained.
The discussions endeavoured to put across a new mindset and frameworks for an integrated and holistic sourcing strategy across all services and the end result was a cross-pollination of current challenges and best practices.
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