Driving Impact through Collaboration: Collaboration in the GIC-Parent, GIC-Vendor, and GIC-GIC Ecosystem

24 Apr 2013
by Sakshi Garg

Background

The Global In-house Center (GIC) model is evolving and becoming an integral part of the sourcing strategy for most large global organizations. While the extent of adoption of the GIC model varies across organizations, most GICs deliver significant impact to their parent organizations, through a combination of savings, robust service delivery, and different types of value-adds beyond savings.

As GICs evolve, their sphere of influence extends beyond their own service delivery to the broader ecosystem. Exhibit 1 illustrates the broader ecosystem in which GICs operate today, which includes the parent, other GICs (within the company and across companies), vendors, and other institutions (e.g., universities and government).

The concept of collaboration is relevant in the context of this broader ecosystem. We define ecosystem collaboration as “ways of working together through the formal and/or informal means to achieve common goals, often beyond ongoing service delivery mandates”. Collaboration (as defined above) is not to be confused with normal, day-to-day liaisoning for the purposes of service delivery. The emphasis is on achieving goals beyond the “normal call of duty”.

Top 3 reasons for collaborating 

Scope

The focus of this report is on GIC’s collaboration with four components of the ecosystem, namely, the parent, other GICs within the company, GICs across companies, and vendors. Collaboration with other institutions (e.g., universities and government) is excluded from the scope of this research.

This report draws on learnings from the following sources:

  • NASSCOM-Everest Group survey on Collaboration with responses from 40+ GICs (mostly mature GICs with over five years of experience with the GIC model and GIC scale of more than 1,000 FTEs)
  • Discussions (interviews) with 12 GIC leaders and parent stakeholders
  • Everest Group GIC Value Diagnostic Survey 2012/2013 with responses from 55 parent executives and 109 GIC stakeholders

This report was released in the NASSCOM GIC Conclave 2013 held in Bengaluru, India (4-5 March, 2013) and is also available on the NASSCOM website.

 

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