Sourcing Insights with a Dutch Twist

The post will be less valid to American readers and I guess also readers from the U.K. and several Asian countries as it will be a little rant against all the IT process models which are smothering the average Dutch IT organization. Readers from counties which also have a ‘consensus’ culture might however find some common ground in the text below. My country (The Netherlands) is both blessed and cursed with a culture where everybody wants to talk about every decision. This is totally unlike for example the American style where the department head decides and the rest executes. This approach has as a site effect that potential lower in the organization remains untapped, but it also enhances focus and speed.We have a large (IT) service industry and this combined with our consensus culture created an ideal feeding ground for process models like ITIL (infra support), ASL (application support), and BiSL (information management). For process models to be effective they require part of t

Usually sustainability is thought of as cutting down CO2 emissions and planting more trees. But sustainability is more than just acquiring a green image. It is another way to look at your own company, the external environment and thus also your sourcing strategy. Organizations can actually profit from better financial results by a smart application of the modern aspects of this theme. A large oil and gas company outsourced a part of its BPO activities to Asian supplier. This supplier had contracted another co-supplier for data-entry activities who used illegal under aged employees. A non-governmental organization found this out by accident which resulted in a lot of negative press for the oil and gas company. In order to outperform the competition they outsourced several activities, but this backfired due to severe image damage. Several clients which outsourced part of their IT activities to a Tier 3 vendor indicated that they needed more insight in their carbon footprint as part o