CSC Smart Business UK Edition August - Inside outsourcing
Inside outsourcing
Liz Benison, VP and COO of CSC’s UK business, gives us her thoughts on the technologies shaping the outsourcing landscape and how CSC is adapting to meet today’s market challenges.
Liz Benison joined CSC as VP and COO of the UK business in January 2011. Smart Business caught up with her to ask what drew her to the role at CSC and discuss her thoughts on the latest trends in outsourcing and how CSC is responding to the challenges they present.
SB: Please give us an overview of your role
LB: I’m vice president and chief operating officer responsible for the UK and Ireland business across all sectors excluding healthcare. I’m responsible for CSC’s clients within those portfolios and all activities with those clients.
SB: What drew you to the role at CSC?
LB: The culture at CSC is genuinely one off and is the most apolitical I’ve come across on either client or supply side. The strength and length of the relationships we have is quite differentiating. Organisations like ours only really work through networking and the network here is phenomenally strong. The skills within the business are amazing. We’re technologists at heart and very proud of that. A deep understanding of the technologies we implement is in our DNA.
SB: Is the market changing more rapidly than you would have expected and how is CSC stepping up to the challenges?
LB: Yes, it’s changing rapidly and on a number of different dimensions. From a technology angle analysts have been saying for years that cloud’s going to change everything. Now there’s an acceptance that cloud really is the next inflection point like the PC or client server was.
Then there’s a commercial angle. When we first worked with some of our larger clients £100million plus deals were the norm whereas today there are very few deals like that and customers want flexibility and competition within every project.
We are responding in a number of ways. On the technology side we’re the people you come to if you want to understand what cloud is going to do, not just to your IT estate but to your business generally. We’re working on being much more commercially flexible. We’re also thinking through our strategy for capability. The last few years have been about off-shoring and cost arbitrage. These days it’s much more about ‘right-shoring’ and having the appropriate resources in the appropriate place at the right cost point.
SB: What are the emerging services which companies need to be aware of?
LB: Primarily, it’s cloud. Whilst it’s been talked about for a long time, it’s only now that people are starting to trust the technology and get their heads around the commercial angle.
The technology’s proven, the commercials are starting to play out, but it’s what cloud does to the underlying business model where it starts to get really exciting. That’s where an organisation like CSC can really start to add material value.
SM: Has the ‘as a service’ approach matured to a point where it can deliver the majority of processes and supporting IT functions?
LB: Yes, and anyone who’s not experimenting with the service model now is probably falling behind the market. Very few companies are actually moving full-scale business critical functions into the cloud, but there are enough large-scale examples out there now to show that it is something people should be seriously considering.
Royal Mail is a great example of a fairly traditional organisation that has taken something absolutely mission critical – the email system – and put it in the cloud. The journey they’re on is the journey everyone else is going to be starting and it’s going to get really interesting as they make the leap with front facing applications.
SB: What are the pitfalls of these emerging technologies?
LB: The pitfalls are the same that exist for traditional technology. You’re only as good as the implementation and you need enough skilled people, both within the client’s organisation and in the market generally, to be able to see the approach through. It takes a certain level of thinking and a lot of organisations are not there yet.
SB: How are you changing CSC to take account of all these changes in the market?
LB: We are running a programme called “Better By Design”. We’re involving customers in terms of understanding what they really want. It’s all about practicing what we preach and doing change in a way we would recommend to customers. For example, as our customers move to the cloud we have to move our own infrastructure to the cloud and make sure all the best lessons learnt go into that new environment so that the avenue of our delivery is just as robust and just as repeatable as it has been in the past.
We’re looking at all the things in the market that are causing change and making sure we relate our services and solutions to real sector issues.
SB: How will we be measuring outsourcing success in the future?
LB: Rather than simply looking at how much cost we can take out, success is going to be much more about enabling joint revenue developments. Our history with Royal Mail has been around taking cost out of the estate but all the conversations we’re having with them now are about how they can use the assets they’ve got to generate new revenue streams.
With the UK Border Agency, where we manage the visa application process through a network of Visa Application Centres (VACs), the contracts we’re drawing up are on a fee per successful application completed. In the past we set up a centre and they paid us regardless of whether we did any business through it. With the new VACs we get paid nothing if we don’t do any business through them. Increasingly it will be those sorts of commercial models coming into play.
SB: What is your advice for readers in terms of making the most of these changes in the marketplace?
LB: First, companies have got to move beyond watching where ‘as a service’ is going to dipping their toes in and experiencing it for themselves. Be bold and pick some good pilots that are really going to exploit the technology and the benefits.
Also, demand the best out of organisations like us. We always work better when there’s trust, willingness to invest in the relationship and proper governance. Just because we’re moving into a new phase of technology it doesn’t mean any of those things are any less true than they always were.
SB: What do you hope to achieve in the next year?
LB: We’re working on a three-year plan and I have a very good vision of what I want CSC in the UK to look like including more depth around sectors and being the preferred business partner in the ‘as a service’ economy. I want that to actually mean something to people rather than just being a strap line. I want us to have a deeper and more lasting relationship with the people and communities that we work with. And I want us to be known for driving a different level of value for our clients and partners.
Learn more about CSC’s work in: Royal Mail, UK Border Agency