Late last year, I spent three months in Europe, and met over a 100 people from the business (British Petroleum, Unilever), academia (London School of Economics, King’s College), and international organizations (WTO, ILO).
Willy-nilly, most conversations had an element of globalization — the descriptor of our times. But, each time I tried to bring in the outsourcing aspect of globalization into our conversations, especially with businesses, it was almost always a showstopper. Not because, unlike with American companies, people were hesitant to discuss it, but because they didn’t consider it significant enough to discuss.
Europe’s outsourcing dichotomy: Western European customers purportedly regard outsourcing worthy
of little interest, while Eastern European providers
are scrambling to rake in a share of whatever business is available
Deutsche Bahn, the German transport behemoth, declared that they do not outsource — at all. Yet, a Google search on them reveals that the company does indeed outsource technology, communications infrastructure and customer support, implying that outsourcing does not occupy significant mind space at the company.
British Petroleum and Unilever said that they outsource a lot of their IT work, but pressing them on it or asking for follow up meetings with the “concerned” person yielded little.
The London Stock Exchange said that they outsource IT services and agreed to a follow up meeting, but then the conversation shifted to the more top-of-mind issue of the possible takeover of the Exchange by Nasdaq.
In their scheme of things, it appears, outsourcing is not a very significant part of their gameplan.
At the same time, for providers servicing Western European customers the business opportunity is by no means insignificant. Not a week goes by when Global Services doesn’t have service providers from Eastern and Central Europe or Russia reaching out to us.
Europe’s dichotomy, with customers purportedly regarding outsourcing worthy of little interest and the providers scrambling to rake in a share of whatever business is available, shows that the market is not as mature as the U.S. outsourcing market, where outsourcing is more firmly ingrained in the business psyche.
So it is Europe that we decided to focus our cover story on this month. Contributing writer, Indrajit Basu, spoke to several Western European customers and Eastern European providers to produce our story titled Services in Europe’s Backyard.
