So H-Day has arrived, and we can finally reveal what it actually means. It's the day Horses for Sources became more than a blog... today it becomes an advisory analyst organization focused exclusively on researching global outsourcing strategy.
So why on earth do this?
A natural and logical progression. Simply put, it's a natural progression for Horses. Having developed such an effective community for collecting so many opinions, having such strong outreach to all the key stakeholders in the outsourcing business (buyers, vendors, intermediaries, investors, academics etc), leveraging the three-year development of Horses as the platform for a new research organization is the logical next-step.
The outsourcing buyer needs a pure analyst organization. While there's tons of great content floating around out there, there really isn't one entity that has brought together researchers and real practitioners, with real experience, to focus purely on researching BPO and global sourcing as a pure analyst organization, that doesn't broker deals or write vendor white papers. Some of the sourcing advisors deliver excellent thought-leadership, and they deserve credit for driving the sourcing industry over the last few years. The large analyst shops have stuck to their IT knitting and have largely overlooked BPO - they service IT vendors and IT users. Investing heavily in sales and research to service finance, HR, procurement and other operations professionals desperate to learn more about outsourcing (not solely IT), is not something any of the large traditional analyst firms have done. You can read, in detail, the challenges and opportunies we face over at SageCircle.
The Horses won't change, we just expanded
Firstly, the blog remains, and will have even more content and contribution. We've exported all the content from "fersht.typepad.com" over to www.horsesforsources.com and the blog will continue as a front-end to the analyst organization. We are producing a series of premium content reports that you will need to be a client to access, but the blog will continue to deliver opinion, and discuss many of the key findings from our research. I am encouraging our analyst team to set up their own personal blogs in time (if they want to), and several of them will be sharing snippets of their research on the Horses. And we'll continue to invite industry guests to be interviewed and submit articles.
A big fat personal thank you
Bottom-line, this wouldn't have been possible without the ongoing support and participation of so many of you over the last three years. I am amazed at the sheer quantity of email and comments I get on a daily basis from people all over the world who visit this thing. All I ask is that you continue to lend your opinion, respond to our surveys, and continue to pass on the good word. End of the day, I choose research because I enjoy learning how we can constantly get better at being global, savvy organizations. I do not profess to know how the world will look in 3 years' time, but if we all continue to debate the issues, the future will gradually unravel.
I really do welcome your thoughts, opinions, suggestions, criticisms and contributions, so drop me an email anytime,
Phil.
Congrats, Phil (and team)! I could not be more thrilled for you and for the industry. I love it when an entrepreneur does what he was born to do!
Do me a favor and stay provocative and edgy--the value of the analysis, in my view, is only realized when there is an informed interpreation--even when that interpretation isn't popular.
Can't wait to see where Horses goes from here. I am in India as I write and will start spreading the word!
Posted by: Esteban Herrera | Mar 03, 2010 at 04:22 AM