I attended the NOA Summit in London on 18th and 19th November, where I presented a short paper on "Value for Money in Outsourcing" on the first afternoon.

Other ;-) notable items from the conference included:

• A shocking throwaway comment from the Network Rail speaker that they "insourced maintenance after some of our suppliers got lazy and killed some people" - words fail me
  
• A Cognizant survey had found that only 43% of organizations have tried to quantify the contribution of Outsourcing to the bottom line, with only 19% being "very confident" in the result. No standard measurement approach seems to be in use
  
• Compass find that the Happy Client / Happy Vendor combination is rarer than it should be
  
• Of ~200 delegates, none were from a manufacturer!
  
• There seems to be a tendency to label any international trade in services as offshoring - maybe just "trade" is a better term!
  
• Not everything is suited to offshoring: for instance - the initial claims processing call for a domestic insurance claim requires a UK resident level understanding of the vernacular and culture of a standard British house ("skirting boards" anyone?) and "my dishwasher isn't working" greeted with "why, is he sick?"
  
• No-one really seems to know what innovation means when required of suppliers!
  
• It was claimed that India is now a net inward investor in the UK due to transactions such as Corus, Land Rover Jaguar, Pearl Assurance etc (though I checked the 2008 balance of trade (admittedly a different measure) which was marginally in India's favour).

And finally a salutary lesson. There were two presentations from new CIOs in organisations who had come in and repaired a poor relationship with their incumbent suppliers. I realise I had consulted to both organisations back in 2000 to attempt to repair their poor relationships with their suppliers! Moral of the story - don't attempt to fix the relationship, get a CIO into the client who knows what they are doing!