Maybe it’s presumptuous to make predictions for the year ahead after 2020 brought us so many surprises, but one thing is certain: the Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the way we do business.
Outsourcing in particular has been challenged. How can you safeguard business operations in the face of something like a global pandemic? No one has the answer to that question just yet, but a recent ZDNet article titled “Outsourcing in the 2020s: Cloud and Covid Shake Up Contracting” predicted four trends that will shape outsourcing / third-party IT arrangements over the next year. We were pleased to see that the kind of crowdsourcing solutions we offer at ScaleHub not only satisfies each of these trends, but offers flexibility and security above and beyond what the trends describe.
Here are the 4 outsourcing trends predicted by Joe McKendrick in his article:
More virtual companies means more outsourcing.
The pandemic has overturned the idea that trust can only be fostered in a shared physical workplace. Now that Covid-19 has forced the tearing off of that band-aid, demonstrating that a remote work culture is actually feasible, we can expect that newfound flexibility to spill over into increased willingness to outsource work that was previously handled in house.
Crowdsourcing, by definition, enlists a large number of people to complete a task. Since this enlisting occurs via the internet, physical location becomes irrelevant. In leveraging crowdsourcing, businesses hedge their risks by diversifying delivery locations.
ScaleHub solutions connect to numerous crowdsourcing marketplaces, providing access to 2.3 million crowd contributors worldwide and supporting more than 160 languages. These contributors complete their tasks using an intuitive cloud interface from ScaleHub.
For organizations that have restrictions or preferences of where their data can live and who can work with that data, ScaleHub can route data solely to public crowd contributors in certain locations or offer a private crowd configuration where customers use their own personnel or a defined set of people to access the work.
Cloud truly brings flexibility.
Organizations that had moved all or partial business operations to the cloud before the pandemic struck had an advantage when they needed to shift to a work-from-home model. Cloud technology enables organizations to scale technology resources according to demand, which keeps costs low, and with cloud technology, it will be easier to readjust their technology footprint after the pandemic.
ScaleHub combines the best of human skill and automation through 100% cloud-based crowdsourcing solutions. This means our customers get the best of both speed and accuracy for tedious data processing tasks of any volume, and can scale operations up or down as needed.
Outsourcing should be short and flexible.
A Deloitte survey of attorneys and their clients uncovered that half of respondents from both groups believe that “one of the most significant lessons for the future was to push for shorter and more flexible contracts.” This points to a future in which outsourcing contracts must become more agile in concert with the organizations tasked with becoming so—or risk obsolescence.
Since ScaleHub crowdsourcing solutions provide an ability to scale operations up or down in an instant, we’ve found that they are of particular benefit to outsourcing organizations that have to constantly adjust to changing business conditions. With ScaleHub, BPOs (business process outsourcers), GBS (global business services providers) and SSCs (shared services centers) can take on jobs of any size, and still meet SLAs around speed and accuracy.
This flexibility is mirrored in ScaleHub’s contract terms. Since we have access to such a large network of crowd contributors and the technology to intelligently distribute jobs among them, we don’t require or request fixed volume or fixed term contracts.
Preparedness for future pandemic-like events is key.
The past year proved that business continuity must be a business imperative. We can expect to see business continuity planning expand to include global pandemic scenarios. This planning will undoubtedly include service providers’ ability to deliver from home offices while upholding data security and productivity.
With ScaleHub crowdsourcing solutions, there is no software to implement, and providing access to a dispersed global workforce of millions or even using available platforms for your own workforce mitigates the dangers of putting all your operational eggs in one basket when it comes to outsourcing.
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