Exclusivity - Is it still relevant?
Websters defines 'Exclusivity' as something in the state of being exclusive.. simply put 'Truly yours only'. During the initial days of the Outsourcing wave, customers insisted on consultants working only for them and paid on the number of people working for them exclusively. Down the line, customers have matured on the outsourcing concept and offshoring work to the so-called low cost countries became norm. Customers were focussing on the work getting done for them by the carefully chosen skilled resources thereby reducing the weightage given to the individual's performance.. Monitoring their work was becoming an overhead. Then came the new wave of 'Managed Services' - where the service provider owned the end-to-end delivery of services upon agreed service levels with the customer. Even in this model, the exclusivity continued to exist.. Customers, who could afford, went for an exclusive location or development center for the teams working only for them with high security requirements.
Question is: Is this still relevant or necessary to have exclusivity during these tough times? As long as the agreed upon service levels are met, with no breach of security norms or regulations prescribed by the customer, if a service provider is able to deliver the services.. why not??
IT Shared Services delivery model does exactly that... A consultant's time is efficiently shared across multiple customers.. Such a model works very well for customers too where
(1) A consultant with niche skillset is always difficult to find. In such a case, his services can effectively be shared across multiple (not more than 2 or 3 max) customers so that they benefit from it equally.
(2) Such a consultant may not have work all the time too.. conversely a customer may not have that much work to keep him/her busy either.
In both the cases, the customer pays only for the effort consumed for his work (not for FTE).. and the service provider is able to satisfy the needs of other customers too.. works win-win for both sides.
Interesting!!! Think about it.
