Prof. Leslie Willcocks, prof. Julia Kotlarsky and prof. Ilan Oshri organized this week their seventh global sourcing workshop in the skiing resort in Val d’Isere, France. For the avoidance of the doubt, all three well respected professors love to ski. However, more important, this workshop is making for many years an impact. Over 25 researcher in the (out)sourcing field meet every year to combine an academic conference on global sourcing with great skiing.
At the workshop I presented my research in progress on Business Process Outsourcing in Suriname: call center services. There was a lot of research presented related to cloud computing. Relevant research that was explaining how cloud computing can be integrated in the IT services portfolio. Also authors made strong statements such as a delay in the adoption of the cloud computing. Instead of the by analyst anticipated five year time horizon, a time horizon of ten years was presented. I believe that the authors were right, we need to be a little bit more patient regarding the full adoption of cloud computing.
There was also great paper on e-mail boxes in the cloud applied at higher education institutes in New England (US). That was an eye opener for me. I was under the assumption that only my university provides e-mail boxes in the cloud for students in combination with in-house e-mail boxes for their staff. This study showed that most of the higher education institutes of the sample implemented this unexplainable hybrid model.
Also transition and knowledge transfer was a popular theme in the workshop. Most papers confirm the obvious; face-to-face knowledge transfer is the most effective knowledge transfer. One of the papers mentioned that face-to-face knowledge transfer was only for the large multinational companies who can afford to travel and spend substantial budget on face-to-face knowledge transfer. A provocative statement, which we need to understand better. The author argued that most SMEs simply cannot afford face-to-face knowledge transfer. The author suggested in addition to video conferencing to use short clips, to be prepared by the onshore team, to exchange knowledge. His research indicated that this was a highly effective and cost efficient approach for knowledge transfer.
For next year’s workshop we expect of course a large number of papers on big data. I’m very curious to understand this marketing hype better. It will be worthwhile to attend next year Global Sourcing Workshop in Courchevel, France, which is unfortunately again an attractive ski resort. I will keep you posted.
Prof. Erik Beulen, Tilburg University and holder of the KPMG Global Sourcing chair
