Creating Resiliency in Uncertain Times
Resiliency doesn’t mean having a good DR strategy during these uncertain times. In fact, its much broader than that. It’s about an organization’s ability to withstand a major shock and come out of it with core capabilities intact. Typically the ability to continue operations, maintain baseline and maintain talent are the keys for organizations to emerge from any major disruption.
Furthermore, when a shock occurs, financial survival instincts take over and all 3 points discussed above become afterthoughts, especially talent. People and therefore salaries for most organizations are usually the highest cost thus easiest to part with and hence naturally during shocks you usually see massive layoffs. But with that, what companies often forget is that headcount reductions often lead to loss of key capabilities. Furthermore, due to leaner teams trade-offs are made to SLA’s, security, response times etc. As people walk out the door, so does knowledge and during shocks, doing proper KT/ building good documentation is never even considered.
All of this eventually leads to chaos and often companies are never able to recover and get back to the glory days. But its not all doom and gloom. Since talent, or in such a situation, the loss of talent is usually the main reason organizations are not able to recover, the managed GIC or the Virtual Captive as its often called comes to mind to mitigate a lot of this risk.
A Virtual Captive model is a “people first” outsourcing model which applies the best talent to generate the very best results for its users. Virtual Captive teams have more experienced resources and is a lower turnover model that offers better knowledge retention and intellectual property protection than with legacy providers. Finally, Virtual Captives are built and sourced from scratch and belong exclusively to a client therefore the risk of dependency on the legacy provider is greatly reduced.
The Virtual Captive model operates with a speed and agility that can adapt to an organization’s changing business needs and typically costs 70% less than onshore talent and often 40% less than traditional legacy outsourcing. It has been observed that even highly specialized and experienced teams can be built within the Virtual Captive model at rates as low as $20 per hour.
But how does a Virtual Captive aid in absorbing shocks? Well its quite simple really. Even as some onshore talent may need to be reduced, given that the offshore talent is already supporting a major part of the organization at a very low-cost structure, the disruptions due to onshore exits are negligible. Key knowledge is not lost, neither are capabilities. While Virtual Captive teams can easily support new initiatives/ digital transformations, usually these teams support the core services. When you reduce disruptions to an organization’s core services, it reduces disruptions to ongoing operations and baseline support, thus making it more resilient.
Having said that, building Virtual Captive teams is not easy. This is where experts like Systems Plus can help who have been doing this for over 10 years. Feel free to reach out to me sapan.c@spluspl.com to learn more.
