When do ‘business process services’ become just ‘professional services’? By which I mean, where should the boundary be drawn between the types of business process services you would expect from an IT services company and those from a commercial professional services company?
I ask the question because I sat through a very thought-provoking session held by Hyderabad-based Mahindra Satyam on its Business Services Group (BSG) – i.e. its recently rebranded BPO (business process outsourcing) division. Much focus was put on Mahindra Satyam’s Artwork and Pack Management (A&PM) service, and I had real difficulty differentiating this from what any ad/media agency might do, i.e. artwork design, production of marketing collateral, creating presentations, etc etc.
Mahindra Satyam says its A&PM proposition is all about ‘business process transformation’, i.e. they can make the ‘business process’ of artwork design-through-deliverable sweeter and cheaper. No doubt they can as they are already doing it at some marquee clients. But my question is, should they be doing it?
This is not Mahindra Satyam’s first venture into ‘non-traditional BPO’. In its prior incarnation as Satyam, it acquired a video animation company. Bits of this have since been divested, but Animation and 3D Modelling is still part of Mahindra Satyam’s BSG portfolio.
We think the future of business process services as delivered by IT services companies lies more in highly leveraged platform-based services and BPaaS (business process as a service). These play firmly to IT services companies’ strong suit (see UK Business Process Services Market Trends & Forecast – 2012).
On the other hand, maybe the answer is that there should be no boundary between what you might call IT-enabled business process services and commercial professional services. If you can turn a buck on it, then why not? But then you have to ask the question, ‘what really is your knitting’ and are you sticking to it?
