Eyes Wide Open – What Are the Risks of Global Services? | Sherpas in Blue Shirts
Over the last decade, we have been witness to a world that is logically shrinking in size and expanding in its ability to provide options in global services. The phenomenon is being driven by the increased integration of technology and the sudden emergence of service delivery capabilities in new geographies, thus allowing organizations to tap into global resources at a rapidly increasing rate.
The utilization of a global services delivery model is allowing organizations, regardless of their size, to:
- Realize cost savings through labour arbitrage
- Access skill sets and capabilities on a more dynamic level
- Manage a continuous 24-hour service and support model
- Adapt cost structures to facilitate focus on core businesses
Sounds great, so what’s the catch?
The catch is that organizations with global and diverse service delivery models face new and ever changing risks. Some of the triggers of global risk include socio-geo political tension, pandemic crisis, financial events, terrorist events, natural disasters, civil turbulence, and infrastructure disruptions.
When risks manifest into reality for an organization that is using a global delivery model, they can occur at significant speeds and at magnitudes of impact that have not been seen before. This is because most global delivery models are heavily intertwined and have interdependencies that are often overlooked. The ripple effect of a risk event and the complexities of demand on resources for recovery are often not realized until it is too late.
Organizations with a global delivery model require a disciplined approach to successfully manage global risk triggers. To do so, they can implement a comprehensive risk framework to proactively monitor and mitigate perils in their global environment. Two key components of the risk framework are:
Risk monitoring by location
- Develop a baseline risk profile for all targeted cities/countries as part of the decision-making process on delivery centre locations
- Monitor all selected locations on an ongoing basis to assess the change in risk levels
- Develop risk profiles for each city/country that contain location dashboards of key risk indicators to allow for a quick assessment of the change in risk levels from the baseline risk profile against the current risk profile
- Examples of location risk indicators include:
- Strategic risks that assess the city/country risk, including the likelihood of political, social, and economic inefficiencies and stability, inadequate legal system or regulatory pressures, and natural disasters, etc.
- Tactical risks that reflect market-related changes and dynamics, cost of inflation, flexibility of the labour market, availability and quality of the infrastructure, and medical/health events
City-Down and Country-Down analyses
- Identify and understand the impact to the organization and its network of services as a result of a city-wide or country-wide service disruption
- Understand the changing requirements of the organization’s recovery plans by continually monitoring and assessing the impact and the conflict in recovery activities, e.g., competition for infrastructure and labour resources among the organization and all of its service providers that impacts the organization’s service recovery capabilities
The nature of the risk events that are monitored, managed, and prepared for vary greatly. Most naturally occurring events have very little, if any, lead-time. However, there are planned risk events that provide a much greater window into the timing of their occurrence. When an organization is properly monitoring and managing its risks, it should not only have the necessary processes in place to address all types of risk events but also to minimize the impact of each. A few recent examples of risk events are listed in the table below:
As we embrace global service delivery models with open arms, how well prepared is your organization to manage and mitigate the risks in this new and highly integrated world?
