One step ahead of the lawyers
Jinfo Blog

15th December 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Faced with the prospect of having their services outsourced and/or offshored, information managers will quite reasonably try to argue that their research activities are too high up the value chain to be entrusted to operatives thousands of miles away who aren’t in daily touch with the thinking of senior executives at head office. But as we’re already starting to see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e9192 there’s a risk as the global economy continues to deteriorate that more subtle arguments will be swept aside in favour of plain cost cutting. That would certainly explain the Economist’s assessment, in a recent special report http://digbig.com/4xyxx that computer services firms in the undisputed offshoring leader India are in good shape to survive the financial crisis. Smaller firms, which offer imaginative – and perhaps dispensable – niche services could struggle in a slowdown, it suggests, but as much as 80% of the revenues of the biggest ones come from essential services which their customers could not easily cut back. The problem for many information managers, of course, is that providing imaginative services is exactly what they aspire to. So the trick is to render them essential, not niche, and to seize the initiative in outsourcing themselves those lower value functions that they acknowledge could be done further afield – see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e6181 for more advice on this tactic. It also helps to know where the threats may come from – and it’s not always the countries you might expect. Unexpected candidates in Gartner’s top 30 locations for offshore services in 2008 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=835718 include Costa Rica, Vietnam and Morocco, for example. Cost is unsurprisingly the top evaluation criterion, but other factors include political and economic environment, global and legal maturity, and security and privacy – which explains why some developed countries like Canada, New Zealand and Ireland still rate places in the top 30. A further factor – cultural compatibility – explains why language and nearshore locations are also key considerations. But there’s a new challenge to the value chain argument. We hear increasingly of the wisdom of crowds supplanting conventional specialist expertise; and in his new book The End of Lawyers? http://digbig.com/4xyxw Richard Susskind, IT adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, depicts a world in which legal services are commoditized, IT renders conventional legal advice redundant and online systems and services compete with lawyers in providing access to the law and to justice. ‘For the conservative legal adviser, the message is bleak,’ say the book’s publishers Oxford University Press. But ‘for the progressive lawyer, an exciting new legal market emerges’. Exactly the same sentence could have been written about the information profession five years ago. So in the battle to convince bosses of the value we add, we do at least have a head start.

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