Stan Gibson

You hear it everywhere: Today, the market for outsourcing is mainly IT outsourcing, but business process outsourcing is coming on strong and will grow faster than the venerable ITO. Just how will this happen? Heres one example: Tata Consultancy Services scored a coup recently in the United Kingdom when the Indian company signed an $847 […]

The turbulence from the acquisition of US Airways by America West Airlines last month has reached the IT level, as the airlines begin to combine their reservation systems. US Airways had been operating on the SABRE reservation system, while America West had been on the SHARES system. The combined airline will standardize on SHARES. “Its […]

Having embraced instant messaging early in that technologys development, financial services companies banded together in 2002 to promote standards for interoperability. The result was a user group known as FIMA, or Financial Services Instant Messaging Association. From modest beginnings, the group now counts delegates from 24 major financial services companies. “Realizing that IM was increasingly […]

Without knowing it, UBS AG got the message a long time ago. Way back in 1995, Swiss Bank Corp., which would later merge to form UBS, began to adopt instant messaging technology, setting in place a road map of adoption that keeps the financial services company in the forefront of the IM pack. Now the […]

When Dell launched its foray into services a few years ago, it did so in typical Dell fashion: It found a market thats mature enough to be commoditized and entered it cautiously yet energetically. If a recent contract win is any indication, Dell Inc. is executing very well on that strategy; TRW Automotive agreed to […]

Its fall—back-to-school time—and there is no more appropriate time than now to look at IT education and its current crisis. On the heels of oversubscribed IT courses at the time of the dot-com bubble, the subsequent economic recession and IT spending freeze of the early 2000s cast doubt on the value of those same IT […]

BOSTON—IT matters again. Thats the theme being trumpeted at the annual SIMposium conference of the Society for Information Management here this week. At SIMposium a year ago in Chicago, IT critic Nicholas Carr was invited into the lions den of senior IT executives to voice his theories questioning the value of IT to an audience […]

Having announced late last year its intention to rethink its global IT operations, Dutch bank ABN AMRO went public with its outsourcing plans, valued at $2.24 billion over five years, earlier this month. Rather than select a single prime contractor, ABN AMRO went with a group of five providers. IBM Global Services, at $1.87 billion, […]

A new generation of corporate dinosaurs is helplessly awaiting extinction. A study by management consulting company Katzenbach Partners reveals that such outsourcing stalwarts as EDS, Capgemini and Accenture will be undone, gradually but inexorably, by more nimble, more efficient and more profitable Indian companies such as Infosys and Wipro. Katzenbachs study relies on a metric […]

Companies that work with trusted partners do well when venturing into China, experience has shown. Trusted relationships, known in Chinese as “guanxi,” are critical, but building trust with new acquaintances requires knowledge of customs and attitudes that in many cases are the opposite of those to which Americans are accustomed. For example, while Americans value […]