Telecom Expense Management Featured Article

Change is coming, watch out. Enterprises seeking ways to boost their business strategies are looking more and more toward information technology (IT) to get the job done. In fact, Gartner (News - Alert) recently conducted a survey in which eighty-five percent of chief information officers (CIOs) responded by saying they anticipate significant IT changes during the next three years.

 

The list of key IT priorities, survey respondents said, include business intelligence applications and document management. Given those findings, it’s not surprising that more and more enterprises are seeking business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions like telecom expense management (TEM).

 

BPO firms offer specialized technologies and systems that can greatly enhance the efficiency of tasks like invoice management, contract negotiation and asset inventory associated with communications and business systems.

 

In another report, Gartner also recently predicted significant growth for the worldwide outsourcing market—8.1 percent for 2008. Although publicly-reported IT outsourcing and BPO decreased during 2007, Gartner said actual numbers are on the rise; companies are increasingly opting for multi-providers strategies that may involve deals too small to report individually.

 

That may be true overall, but in the TEM arena (one example of outsourcing a particular type of business process), in general there tends to be a marketplace consolidation with more and more providers offering “complete telecom lifecycle” services that include provisioning, invoice management, dispute resolution and inventory for both wireline and wireless communications services.

 

One thing is for sure: with technology offering new and better ways to perform routine but traditionally time-consuming processes, outsourcing is likely to become more and more attractive as time goes on.