Stories by Stephanie Overby

The ubiquitous convenience store chain updates its loyalty program from punch cards to a mobile app for super-frequent patrons
.

Brad L. Peterson, partner and co-leader of the business and technology sourcing practice of law firm Mayer Brown, discusses how new digital services are disrupting the IT outsourcing industry and what this means in terms of how outsourcing contracts must evolve.

Most enterprises are likely to hit a roadblock after the initial stage of digital adoption. Everest Group calls this phenomenon the ‘digital trough.’

Companies like Amazon, Tesco and Honeywell are looking to offshore IT subsidiaries to deliver digital transformation.

IT organizations are increasingly interested in adopting DevOps models to deliver applications faster, better and cheaper to the business, but they're not inclined to look to their IT service providers for help with these efforts.

Typical medical laboratory reports could hardly be less personal. Whether they're for basic blood work or a battery of tests for serious disease, the black-and-white printouts of results--presenting a sea of cryptic abbreviations and numbers--remain largely indecipherable to the patients whose health depends upon them.

As business needs--and the new technologies required to support them--evolve ever more rapidly, outsourcing contracts signed just a year or two ago are already getting stale. That's why Mayer Brown business and sourcing technology partner Dan Masur is advising companies to revamp their outsourcing deals right now to not only access new options, but also to cut significant costs.

IT organisations big and small are seeing significant benefits from some of their cloud computing contracts. The value of Cloud services deals increased 60 per cent in the last three years and the $UD40 billion global cloud services market is expected to grow 27 per cent annually over the next three years, according to recent research by the Everest Group.

Mobile app development is usually cheap, fast and dirty: Introduce some functionality and fix the problems over time. At Westinghouse Electric, however, there's no room for error in the development of a tablet application critical for testing the nuclear power facilities it builds for electricity providers around the world.

As companies adopt more cloud IT services and work with an increasing number of service providers, the tried-and-true IT towers of the past no longer serve their needs. "The old model lacks the clarity of ownership required to drive decisions on as-a-service offerings that span the traditional tower structure," says Steve Keegan, principal with outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon. "Determining who makes the call isn't straightforward -- the server team, the app team or the database team?"

Disputes between outsourcing customers and their providers are like a clash between buffalo, says Daniel Masur, partner in charge of the Washington, D.C. office of law firm Mayer Brown. The parties bang heads, lock horns and make little progress other than giving each other a massive headache.

CIOs have big ideas for marketing and customer experience using sensors and analytics.

Vishal Sikka began his tenure as CEO of Infosys last week by approving about 5,000 promotions within the Bangalore-based IT services firm in an attempt to improve morale and slow down attrition rates.

IT outsourcing customers may not be mad as hell yet, but they're losing patience with service providers who aren't working with them to provide value beyond the basic terms of their contracts.

The lines between IT and marketing are blurring in the age of digital marketing. For that reason, it's more important than ever that CIOs and CMO communicate consistently and effectively. To examine this evolving relationship as it pertains to big data in particular, CIO.com partnered with CMO.com to produce this report.