Today’s demand for big data talent reflects a recurring theme that happens whenever a new valuable technology becomes available. Companies face the conundrum of figuring out how to quickly capitalize on the latest technology to gain business advantage during a time when a limited supply of skilled talent exists in the marketplace.

Internally, the tug of war begins because marketing, operations and customer service all push to leverage these technologies as quickly as possible, while IT tries to figure out how to get it done. The business ends up with two options: develop the expertise internally or partner with an outside resource.

When a seemingly sweet deal turns sour, it's time to prepare an exit strategy. Here’s how to preserve essential business operations, your vendor relationship and your job.

Nick Vennaro, Capto co-founder, recently had a chance to attend and speak at the first Health IT Expo in New Orleans around negotiating the right supplier contracts and treating suppliers as partners for better outcomes.

Outsourcing decisions often come down to a relatively simple cost-driven Return on Investment (ROI) calculation: how much will the cost change in each scenario and how quickly can that investment be recovered? 

On the surface, this purely economic approach seems appropriate enough. After all, economics are certainly important. But over-reliance on purely financial-driven outsourcing decisions is one of the biggest causes of the “strategy-to-execution gap,” namely the distance between a company’s business strategies and its ability to execute on them. 

The most successful IT outsourcing decisions create truly innovative execution strategies that deliver meaningful business results. The outsourcing decision, however, frequently comes down to a cost-driven ROI calculation: how much will all this innovation cost us, and how long will it take to recover those costs? This is the wrong mindset and often the primary reason why IT outsourcing is generally underperforming.

There's a lot of hype around IoT in healthcare as well as other businesses. If you're considering, or already implementing, IoT strategy in your organization, you should be using these four sequential areas of focus, or the four As of IoT: Access, Aggregation, Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence.

Capto CEO, Tracy Currie, was recently interviewed for Healthcare Finance Management Association's CFO Forum by Laura Ramos Hewer.

Given the many competing priorities in an organization, CFOs need to make sure they understand the "why" behind their IT investments. Read the HFMA CFO Forum article.

Creating effective, high-performing and well-governed outsourcing deals was one of the key services Capto offered at our launch in 2009. SYNAPTIC Outsourcing is still a key service we offer our clients. The fundamentals remain solid, but how we help make these deals successful has evolved dramatically. I’ll explain how we’ve applied our SYNAPTIC Sourcing methodology differently over time.

SYNAPTIC Outsourcing was born out of our personal experience supported by extensive research that confirmed our hypothesis at the time: IT outsourcing was broken. Deals were under-performing economically and operationally when compared to other broad business trends such as supply chain management.

Recently, we here at Capto had the opportunity to “eat our own dog food” at one of our clients, a Fortune 100 company. In the middle of a Capto-designed Business Intelligence (BI) Analytics Acceleration Program—part of our Synaptic methodology—our client’s big-data analytics leader accepted a position in another area. The VP in charge of BI asked us to step in and fill the leadership void in the analytics team.

Cyber security has garnered substantial media coverage in recent weeks, and CIOs and CISOs (chief information-security officer), along with their bosses, are probably wondering if they are doing enough to protect their company’s mission-critical data/information.

If you want to know if you are doing enough, conducting a security assessment/audit is a great place to start. But the key to assurance is on the back end—taking prescriptive steps for mitigating risks the audit uncovers and considering the use of a Managed Security Services (MSS) provider.

SourcingFocus.com recently ran a story about outsourcing trends that pointed to “a growing appetite for managed security services” due to the rising complexity and volume of cyber threats. Keeping the enterprise secure is becoming a primary consideration over other business initiatives.

With the increased focus on security, it is important that business and IT leaders understand Managed Security Services (MSS)—what they are, when to use them, and how to maximize the outcomes of a company’s outsourced MSS efforts.

Since day one, we here at CAPTO have talked about how outsourcing is broken. The way companies have gone about obtaining additional help via outside resources has failed on a number of levels. This failure, which is due to universal flaws, typically results in reduced value, underperforming economics, lack of innovation, increased risk, and compromised service levels.

It’s one thing to identify a problem and even use a PowerPoint slide to sum it up, but it’s quite another to hone in on how to remedy the situation...

The spate of announcements about Major League Baseball pitchers going under the knife for their second Tommy John surgery had me shaking my head. In the case of Oakland A’s pitcher Jarrod Parker, forearm discomfort plagued him late in the 2013 season. Clearly Parker’s discomfort was a symptom of a bigger problem, which will now lead to a year or more of downtime.

For Parker and the other pitchers, perhaps it was a situation where the focus was so much on addressing their symptoms that they neglected to consider whether changes in mechanics were needed to ensure they weren’t putting too much strain on their repaired elbows.

In this post, I will step you through the SYNAPTIC sourcing framework—a disciplined, comprehensive approach for assessing a company’s ability to successfully implement a progressive, outcomes based, sourcing program for a given business or technical area and then implement the steps necessary to unlock innovation and accelerate delivery of positive results.

The SYNAPTIC framework is built on a foundation of outcomes-based sourcing principles. Everything we do here at CAPTO is premised on the belief that the focus should be on the goals, not on the transactions or mechanisms. We are also strong proponents of laying the groundwork early for measuring the outcomes to ensure our clients are getting what they truly want out of the relationship.

CIO Insight had a blog post that caught our attention (Getting Smarter About IT Outsourcing).

It closed with this:

For CIOs, the challenge is to develop a coherent business strategy that focuses on insourcing, outsourcing, multi-sourcing and cloud computing in a comprehensive way. Somewhere along the path to enlightenment and success, there's also a need to build more accountability and ownership into sourcing operations. The task of managing IT environments is only going to become more complex during the next few years.

Here's our take...

I recently had the opportunity to review a Forrester report (“Define Your Governance Model For Outsourcing Relationships”) which based on the title, appeared to be highly relevant to what we do in our SYNAPTIC Sourcing practice.

One of the areas that Wolfgang Benkel and his team focused on was how to prepare a vendor governance program for the future IT services environment, and indeed I could see the phrase “vendor governance” was mentioned a lot in the eighteen-page piece. While I tended to agree with many of the findings the report discussed, I couldn’t get myself past that phrase...

For those of us in the business of making sourcing decisions, organizational change management (OCM) has been part of the conversation for a while. People understand, in theory at least, that OCM is something they ought to do, but they often place it low on the priority list. In fact, we’ve noticed that unless a company has experienced first-hand the ill effects of not preparing their organization properly for transformational change, they will continue to treat OCM as just another item to check off from a lengthy list.

Our approach at CAPTO is quite different as we encourage our clients to learn from things we have witnessed in the past, relying on our experience not just their own. If a firm really wants to improve business and operational outcomes, the OCM discussion has to happen much earlier in the process. It also needs to be viewed as a continuum—an ongoing effort that needs to be thought about proactively and in a disciplined manner.

Our approach at CAPTO is quite different...

As part of our SYNAPTIC approach, we at CAPTO do something we refer to as “harvesting the ecosystem.” It’s a way of developing the best solutions for our clients that is related to Joy's Law—the principle that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” which has been attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. For CAPTO the genesis of this idea goes back even further than Bill Joy...

Capto's CEO, Tracy Currie, recently conducted an executive briefing for Fortune 500 CIO and CTOs on a new outcomes-based, research-endorsed sourcing methodology - Vested Outsourcing.