BPO . Products . Analytic > New Frontiers
Every BPO business worth their salt has been talking about platform based business model as being strategy for growth and sustenance. Makes sense for most part, platform do bring in, an ability to create better value for customers and also an ability to deliver this value using more cohesive processes and people interplay. Industry, the BPO one, is slowly but surely moving towards platform and IP based business models.
This all started almost a decade ago, when some BPO coined the term platform. It has taken more than a decade for some companies in the sector to place their money where there mouth is. It is only recently that some selective BPOs have put serious enough investment into developing platform based models for their next growth.
Better late than never !
New Transition Needed -- >
But, industry should be driving towards a unique transformation. BPO companies need to become the product companies, where conventional product workflow and interface based automation are developed based how BPO organizes its workforce and how it expects the users (processing agents, as they have been called in past) to be productive.
Changing Work Profile of Enterprise User -- >
As the work profile of the companies (which utilize software and automation), changes, a distinctive change in the BPO proposition needs to take place. Majority of the today's software stacks deployed in companies to automate the processes, are being accessed by service providers remotely.
BPO Users are the Primary Users (for traditional products)
More and more of the software product workflows and features are now used by BPOs people as opposed to people within the enterprises. Here the gap is in the way software solutions (and products) were developed. These were developed for primary consumption by enterprise users within the premise. Today, when majority of those workflows and features have BPO processing agents as their primary users, the objectives are slightly different and beyond simple completion of a task using workflow of the application/products. Most of today's products do not fit the bill completely when a remotely located user within a BPO is accessing the software/solution to complete a task.
Enterprise Users need Decision Making Tools
Within enterprise premise users profile is changing, and, most of the focus today is on reporting and analytics. Enterprises want their internal users to use their software solutions and products to make decisions, not to do transaction entries. Transactions have already been shipped out, to be handled by BPO and equivalent companies. Some of this getting capitalized by new age analytic and BI companies, which are creating a decision making layer on top of existing data and software stacks.
The Big Paradigm Shift -- >
As things evolve, and, this shift of enterprise work profile and preference firms up, following transition needs to take place in the technology industry,
- BPOs need to evolve into product companies of the past
- Analytic and BI companies need to become new age product companies
- Today's product companies need to evolve into analytic & BI focused ones
BPOs need to rework the workflow based software solutions and products, based on their custom needs to monitor productivity and quality. And, analytic companies need to start focusing on the new work profile of enterprises, which is around decision making than just providing intelligence based on data mining. Some of the product companies, will probably shift from transaction and workflow based solutions to analytic based solution, to fit into new need of enterprise customers.
Convergence of Models and Solutions -- >
(will make it possible)
A convergence is (or should be) brewing. One, which can bring following into a good synergistic interplay.
- BPO Workforce and Traditional Software Products/Solutions
- Analytic / BI and New Product for Decision Making
- Cloud / SaaS bringing both of above together
Hopefully this convergence takes place sooner.
And, hopefully.
It is driven by real need, than hyped up terms and hype cycles !