Huge week last week, I attended the extremely well organized SSON conference in Melbourne which was very well attended and there were a lot of very interesting conversations taking place during the three day annual event.

For me the thing that stuck out is how many new players are coming into the space looking for information and support. The audience in my view was broadly speaking, broken into three sections:

1. The very sophisticated and very knowleable players who are looking for the latest trends and ideas;
2. The middle ground who are on the Shared Services / Outsourcing journey and are reinforcing what they all ready know and looking for what is ahead; and
3. The ‘newbies’ who don’t know what they don’t know but know that they need to catch up.

This last group is particularly interesting as they are hungry for knowledge and are almost pre market in terms of BPO 1.0.

Another trend that came through was the need to get good professional advice from seasoned players, there were a few horror stories about BPO projects that fell over because the ‘buy side’ team did not know as much as they thought they knew when the project was being negotiated and instead of seeking outside help they batted on, and eventually paid the price.

Interestingly the Sauce’s new BPO research (http://thesauce.net.au/sauce-research/australian-bpo-research-report-2012-overview) that was supported by IBM and Fuji Xerox Australia indicated that about 15 percent of major companies in Australia are dissatisfied with their out sourcing experience and that seems to suggest that a small number of projects were not set up properly and correctly project managed from the get go- Hopefully next year we be able to report a decline in that statistic.

A number of senior people on the buy side spoke about having a ‘buffer’ of spare people and resources to pick up the slack when things do not always go according to plan.

Best speech for me was Tommy Hafey the legendary AFL Footy coach who addressed the gathering – when he finished speaking I was looking for somewhere to do my pushups – If you have no idea what I am talking about – suffice to say it’s a Melbourne thing.

The Sauce launched its new BPO study and I have to say it has every thing that you wanted to know about The Australian BPO buy side but were afraid to ask – don’t forget there is a market place event on May the 2nd in Sydney please go to http://outsourcingreporting2012.eventbrite.com/ it’s a great networking opportunity and chance to hear what’s happening in the market.

If you are a twitter fan and you want to join the conversation – please visit https://twitter.com/#!/BPOResearch

Keep those stories coming in.

Cheers,
Martin Conboy