Analyzing The Outsourcers

摘要

Ah, the start of a promising courtship, the dreams and hopes for a happy future together. Then the first (then the second and the third) disagreement surfaces, and the reality of melding backgrounds, ideals, and goals looks so complicated. So it is with the continuing love affair between cor-porate America and the outsourcing companies that run their business-technology systems. But surpris-ingly, this long-running, sometimes stormy romance is doing better than most marriages. Two-thirds of companies say their outsourcing experiences have met expectations, according to 700 business-tech-nology professionals in informationWeek Research's Analyzing The Outsourcers study. As in love, the perfect mate might not be the beauty queen. We asked customers to rank their sat-isfaction with their outsourcers, and the best-known names in the business, IBM and EDS, don't top the list. No. 1 is Hewlett-Packard, a company some consider a sleeping giant among outsourcing providers because it's better known for hardware, followed closely by Sprint and Accenture. The differences separating the companies were fairly close, with the exception of one: WorldCom, which ranked a distant ninth.