Critical Success Factors to Automating Your Global Services Delivery

In today’s economic situation, much has been made about the need to automate business processes to cut overhead costs and accelerate services to the marketplace. This can prove difficult for any organization due to a variety of mitigating factors including budget constraints, executive support, and unexpected changes to project scope. These issues manifest themselves exponentially when dealing with enterprise, multi-national corporations. This need for automation is more important than ever. Over the past generation, we have seen a transformation in the value drivers of the world economy. Major companies have moved from focusing on higher product margins to driving increased margins and competitive differentiation through the use of “value added” services. This move has been highlighted in IBM’s transformation from a product to services company and has been attempted and considered by an enormous variety of enterprises large and small. With this shift in the world economy comes a need for a shift in the type of systems and processes that will drive business success. This article seeks to outline some of the keys to consider in beginning the journey to automate the global services delivery chain. It requires new partnerships, processes and an open mind to achieve success. With operations across the map, global business automation is a high risk, high reward proposition. However, by understanding and implementing the following success factors, you can greatly increase not only the speed and efficiency of your initiative but also its return on investment (ROI).