05.23.07
Posted in Best Practices, Governance, Outsourcing, Posts at 7:18 am by Gary M. Zeiss
Addressing Complexity
Complexity is the first thing that we must change to facilitate the development of governable outsourcing deals. We have all been taught to believe, axiomatically, that “more information is better information.†Current outsourcing deals generally reflect this approach, drawing “every leaf on every tree†to describe the outsourced and retained services.
More information is not necessarily better information, however. Better information would not only clearly describe a process, but also provide a better analytical framework for describing future processes.
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05.20.07
Posted in Best Practices, Governance, Outsourcing, Posts at 2:18 pm by Gary M. Zeiss
Why do we create ungovernable deals?
Outsourcing deal documents fail to support governance for many reasons. Chief among them is that the deal paper is simply too complex. These documents go on for literally hundreds of pages, are full of arcane language and do not provide adequate information to permit a Customer to govern the relationship. In addition to complexity, the deal documents are often inflexible – requiring significant legal effort through amendment to reflect the growth or change in business.
The reader may wonder how a document can span hundreds of pages, yet still include insufficient information to permit quality governance. The answer is simply that the documents contain the wrong information – information that does not provide a basis for quality governance.
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05.16.07
Posted in Best Practices, Governance, Outsourcing, Posts at 3:46 pm by Gary M. Zeiss
Like most outsourcing attorneys, I have experienced the telephone book-sized outsourcing deal. Truth be told, I even created a couple in my day. Being in the relatively unique position of in-house outsourcing counsel, I also had the opportunity to deal with the other end of the process – governance. While these documents were good, sometimes great, from a purely legal standpoint, many of them failed as business resources, too complex and impenetrable for mere mortals (e.g., non-lawyers) to use in their day-to-day operations.
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05.12.07
Posted in Best Practices, Information Technology, Outsourcing, Posts at 11:34 pm by Gary M. Zeiss
A few years ago, a product came out that could have - and should have - revolutionized much of the way that business information is presented. Called the “Ambient Orb,” the product was simply a sphere that glowed, usually with the stock market. Green was up - the brighter, the higher; red was down, the brighter the lower; and yellow was in the middle. The underlying goal was (and is) to create “glanceable” information - useful information that can be known without focusing on the subject matter at hand.
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05.06.07
Posted in Healthcare, Outsourcing, Posts at 4:34 pm by Gary M. Zeiss
In E.M. Foerster’s “A Passage to India,†the conflicts between British aristocracy and the Indian professional class was explored. It was a difficult story, highlighting pride, prejudice and institutionalized bias.
These days, however, passages to India (and Singapore, Argentina, Belgium and Thailand, among others) mean something entirely different for hundreds of thousands of people (about 60,000 of them, American). Instead of looking down on the native citizens, these intrepid travelers are seeking to have the native citizens save their lives, fix their knees or lift their faces. Medical tourists come from all over the industrialized world – including from countries with government-run health care, countries with relatively poor health care infrastructures and, in the case of the U.S., places with exorbitantly expensive health care systems.
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