Recently, we here at Capto had the opportunity to “eat our own dog food” at one of our clients, a Fortune 100 company. In the middle of a Capto-designed Business Intelligence (BI) Analytics Acceleration Program—part of our Synaptic methodology—our client’s big-data analytics leader accepted a position in another area. The VP in charge of BI asked us to step in and fill the leadership void in the analytics team.

Cyber security has garnered substantial media coverage in recent weeks, and CIOs and CISOs (chief information-security officer), along with their bosses, are probably wondering if they are doing enough to protect their company’s mission-critical data/information.

If you want to know if you are doing enough, conducting a security assessment/audit is a great place to start. But the key to assurance is on the back end—taking prescriptive steps for mitigating risks the audit uncovers and considering the use of a Managed Security Services (MSS) provider.

SourcingFocus.com recently ran a story about outsourcing trends that pointed to “a growing appetite for managed security services” due to the rising complexity and volume of cyber threats. Keeping the enterprise secure is becoming a primary consideration over other business initiatives.

With the increased focus on security, it is important that business and IT leaders understand Managed Security Services (MSS)—what they are, when to use them, and how to maximize the outcomes of a company’s outsourced MSS efforts.

Situation—Two Interdependent Companies Each Constrained by the Other’s Strategy

A Fortune 100 company found its ability to scale in a critical technical area was constrained because its software partner could not keep up with the demands associated with its custom software product. As a result, the broadcaster wanted to move to a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product, which would reduce software maintenance costs. The software partner also aimed to get out of the custom software business and transition into a product-based company, but they were constrained by cash flow and depended on revenue from their custom products. Both companies had the same goal, but couldn’t find the path to reach it.

We founded CAPTO Consulting on the premise that technology investments far too often fail to meet their operational or economic objectives. Our experience on both sides of the equation—in leading strategic technology investment initiatives for Fortune 200 companies and in having held executive-level positions at leading service and technology providers—has taught us that the technology ecosystem MUST perform to higher standards of timely, predictable, value-driven performance.

Our methodology, SYNAPTIC, was born out our private equity practice and shaped over time to drive solutions to our customers at the speed of thought and benefiting from our diverse, multi-disciplined background to make cognitive connections necessary to knit together the components necessary for differentiating outcomes...

Since day one, we here at CAPTO have talked about how outsourcing is broken. The way companies have gone about obtaining additional help via outside resources has failed on a number of levels. This failure, which is due to universal flaws, typically results in reduced value, underperforming economics, lack of innovation, increased risk, and compromised service levels.

It’s one thing to identify a problem and even use a PowerPoint slide to sum it up, but it’s quite another to hone in on how to remedy the situation...

The spate of announcements about Major League Baseball pitchers going under the knife for their second Tommy John surgery had me shaking my head. In the case of Oakland A’s pitcher Jarrod Parker, forearm discomfort plagued him late in the 2013 season. Clearly Parker’s discomfort was a symptom of a bigger problem, which will now lead to a year or more of downtime.

For Parker and the other pitchers, perhaps it was a situation where the focus was so much on addressing their symptoms that they neglected to consider whether changes in mechanics were needed to ensure they weren’t putting too much strain on their repaired elbows.

In this post, I will step you through the SYNAPTIC sourcing framework—a disciplined, comprehensive approach for assessing a company’s ability to successfully implement a progressive, outcomes based, sourcing program for a given business or technical area and then implement the steps necessary to unlock innovation and accelerate delivery of positive results.

The SYNAPTIC framework is built on a foundation of outcomes-based sourcing principles. Everything we do here at CAPTO is premised on the belief that the focus should be on the goals, not on the transactions or mechanisms. We are also strong proponents of laying the groundwork early for measuring the outcomes to ensure our clients are getting what they truly want out of the relationship.

CIO Insight had a blog post that caught our attention (Getting Smarter About IT Outsourcing).

It closed with this:

For CIOs, the challenge is to develop a coherent business strategy that focuses on insourcing, outsourcing, multi-sourcing and cloud computing in a comprehensive way. Somewhere along the path to enlightenment and success, there's also a need to build more accountability and ownership into sourcing operations. The task of managing IT environments is only going to become more complex during the next few years.

Here's our take...

I recently had the opportunity to review a Forrester report (“Define Your Governance Model For Outsourcing Relationships”) which based on the title, appeared to be highly relevant to what we do in our SYNAPTIC Sourcing practice.

One of the areas that Wolfgang Benkel and his team focused on was how to prepare a vendor governance program for the future IT services environment, and indeed I could see the phrase “vendor governance” was mentioned a lot in the eighteen-page piece. While I tended to agree with many of the findings the report discussed, I couldn’t get myself past that phrase...

For those of us in the business of making sourcing decisions, organizational change management (OCM) has been part of the conversation for a while. People understand, in theory at least, that OCM is something they ought to do, but they often place it low on the priority list. In fact, we’ve noticed that unless a company has experienced first-hand the ill effects of not preparing their organization properly for transformational change, they will continue to treat OCM as just another item to check off from a lengthy list.

Our approach at CAPTO is quite different as we encourage our clients to learn from things we have witnessed in the past, relying on our experience not just their own. If a firm really wants to improve business and operational outcomes, the OCM discussion has to happen much earlier in the process. It also needs to be viewed as a continuum—an ongoing effort that needs to be thought about proactively and in a disciplined manner.

Our approach at CAPTO is quite different...

As part of our SYNAPTIC approach, we at CAPTO do something we refer to as “harvesting the ecosystem.” It’s a way of developing the best solutions for our clients that is related to Joy's Law—the principle that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” which has been attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. For CAPTO the genesis of this idea goes back even further than Bill Joy...

Capto's CEO, Tracy Currie, recently conducted an executive briefing for Fortune 500 CIO and CTOs on a new outcomes-based, research-endorsed sourcing methodology - Vested Outsourcing.