Aran jumpers, memes and outsourcing best practice

Flying back from the most recent eSCM training in Paris, a note in Cara magazine caught my eye. It stated that ‘Aran sweaters were originally knitted in the 1920s to be work by boys for their First Holy Communion. The idea that drowned Aran fishermen were identified by their sweaters is a misconception based on a passage in JM Synge’s Riders to the Sea’. I know that I have spread the Aran fishermen stories – and always believed it to be true.

Urban legends have become such a part of our consciousness that I wonder when we will start to have reverse Urban Legends – all it will take will be to drop the idea in the right place, that the fact that the Wright brothers invented the plane, that Einstein played the Violin, or that Ireland were involved in the last Rugby World Cup was an Urban Legend, and soon it will be written out of history.

We live in world of shifting, moving information – a sort of cambrian explosion in the meme world. And this makes it harder and harder to find stable information to structure your business around. During the training session this week we had lots of war stories, lots of examples, and lots of different views – all valid and useful, and many of them entertaining. However war stories are a little like Urban Legends – we don’t really know what is true, what is legend, and what is true but sounds like it should be legend.

eSCM provides a set of best practices for outsourcing based on experience. It is a set of war stories – but validated, researched, interpreted and tested – like finding your Urban Legend Published in Nature! This is the toolset to use when IT enabled sourcing is a key part of your business, either as a service provider or as a client.

As for Paris... what can I say? Unlike Traoloch’s experience in Amsterdam, we were in a vibrant but un-touristy location, the sun shone, the brasseries were packed - and as the song goes....

Lets stop learning from our own mistakes......

Last week was a challenging one. I spent a few days on the next module of an ongoing training course in a sourcing quality standard called eSCM. Making use of outsourcing and shared services effectively can be a tricky business. Lots of people know a little bit about it. Very few people have any real experience managing either in an outsource environment or managing the transition to an outsource environment. This creates several problems. The major one is that people struggle to find expertise to support them in their outsource and so tend to run the project themselves from 'first principles'. Many capable and smart people do very well. There is no reason why they wouldn't - the issue is that there is more risk and effort involved than anyone would like to admit.

At Palladium we have experience and expertise - the problem we had was that communicating that expertise and experience can sometimes be difficult - especially as we are basically just saying - 'look we have done this before, we have made the mistakes and we have some greaTt people and some good tools to help you'. Use our experience and save yourself some time, money and sweat. Most people want independent validation. We would too. Hence eSCM.

So what is it? It is a quality standard. It is a set of best practices. It essentially says 'Look if you were perfect and know everything about outsourcing and shared services here are the 158 things you would be doing'. where is the value? Well if you are starting off on the sourcing journey it gives great visibility of some of the key capabilities you need to have in your organization and some of the key activities you need to undertake to source successfully.

The point is this - if you are seriously considering sourcing - whether it is outsourcing, shared services or any other form of outsourcing then you don't need to learn from your mistakes. Invest in Sourcing Education to ensure that your arrangements deliver the promised benefits. Building capability around the eSCM best practices is definitely a good place to start.