And what does being “it” mean exactly?  Among other things, it means that I need to tell my readers seven things they don’t already know about me.  So strap yourselves in as I open the top secret dossier:

1. I have been moonlighting as a voice actor for nearly twenty years, including gigs for Southwest Airlines, Greyhound, HP, MetLife and others.  You can laugh at my current demo track here.
2. I am the proud father of two dachshunds (Charley & Otto).  They call the shots, but every once in a while we get revenge (see Halloween pics here).  And Charley has his own “Wiener Blog” where he’s plotting a dachshund revolution, so watch your ankles.
3. I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and was raised on beer and brats until the age of six.
4. My brother is the world’s leading expert on White Papers.  (And yes, the world does, in fact, need a leading expert on white papers.)  See WhitePaperSource.com or WritingWhitePapers.com for more info.
5. I’ve completed six marathons and used to be a rock climbing enthusiast.  
6. My best friend and I competed to see how many lives we could save during our undergrad years.  We tied at 11 each when I pulled a drowning Australian to shore during graduation weekend.
7. My company’s name was actually penned by my good friend Phil Fersht of Horses for Sources fame.  I don’t know if I stole it, per se, but I definitely jumped the gun on him.

So there you have it!  I’m sure there are more bizarre bits of info I could share but that should whet your appetite.  Have a great week and let’s keep the conversation going.

As many of you are aware, Phil Fersht of AMR Research had posted a simple survey asking buyers, providers and influencers to “rate the raters”.  This morning, Phil announced that the findings of the survey were tainted by false respondents claiming to be Fortune 500 organizations.  Per Phil’s Horses for Sources blog:

“Unfortunately, I received a very large number of suspicious survey responses from a host of “FORTUNE 500 buyers”, whose IP addresses – for some reason – all seemed to emanate from the couple of locations. I received a very large number of these survey submissions clustered within a short time-frame, and they had no names or email addresses attached. They also all had selected one particular list-maker as “highly credible”, while simultaneously describing the same 2 others as having “poor credibility”.”

As someone who has been in this industry for some time now, I am terribly saddened and disappointed to see such a simple attempt at an open information capture to be fraudulently tainted.  Unfortunately, this type of behavior simply perpetuates an area of the industry wrought with increasing distrust.  It seems to me that once again things will have to get worse before they get better.  

Let’s keep the conversation going and our integrity intact.  

Although concern surrounding certain list-makers’ methodologies has been brewing for some time, a frenzy erupted when BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm wrote a very compelling article questioning the practices of Black Book of Outsourcing creators Brown & Wilson.  Per Hamm’s article:

“Claes G. Fornell, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business who specializes in customer satisfaction surveying, says Brown & Wilson’s methods aren’t sound. First, he says, the firm can’t be sure all the people who respond are qualified. Second, the results could be tilted in favor of companies that urge their customers to participate. ‘You’d be better off not doing anything than doing a survey like this,’ says Fornell.”

Picking up on these concerns, Deborah Kops (CMO for WNS Global Services) repurposed her May 2006 article (“The Book of Lists”) for Fersht’s audience.  Among many insightful statements, Kops questions the value of lists and what they don’t tell us:

“A key component of editorial calendars and other sponsorships in the outsourcing industry, rankings and lists can provide a service to communities by identifying players and trends. But let’s not delude ourselves; they are also a business imperative for publishers, associations and pundits to build membership and/or circulation and sell adverts, publications and reprints, playing on the sell side’s need for recognition. They generally make someone money! This is not necessarily a negative, but is rather the way the world goes around. What’s critical is that that which is editorial and that which is financial should be kept completely independent at all costs. Pay for play in any form must not be the modus operandi.”

I believe Deborah was very gracious by not explicitly referring to those entities whose lists, rankings and awards have tainted the perceived or real value of the industry’s providers.  Those of us who have been in the market for sometime now can easily identify the organizations who have handsomely profited from such point in time, pay-to-play assignments of value.

The Catch-22 of our current industry state is this: In lieu of an attractive alternative, provider marketing organizations will continue to pour precious funding into the pre-existing ranking and rating processes. Thus, the cycle perpetuates itself.  We don’t like the lists yet many are afraid to not be on them.  However, until there is a collective halting of such spend, we can’t expect the system to self-correct. In the interim, we can hold out hope that a better mechanism will emerge that is truly transparent, unbiased and effective. Let’s keep the conversation going.

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It you want to voice your thoughts on these issues, place your votes by judging the judges.  

“Under the agreement, IBM will provide compensation, benefits, recruiting, learning, payroll administration, call center support and related IT systems services to Bristol-Myers Squibb. Additionally, IBM will implement a SAP solution and integrate Bristol-Myers Squibb’s global workforce data into one portal that can be accessed by employees, managers and HR professionals around the globe. The services will support Bristol-Myers Squibb’s operations in the United States, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium, as well as, limited support to 40 of its additional country locations in Asia Pacific, Europe and the Americas.”

Phil Fersht of AMR Research has heralded this agreement in his popular blog Horses for Sources, citing this contract as further validation of the yeomen’s work being performed by leading global outsourcing providers:

“As the global providers become increasingly proficient at deploying offshore resources to support these processes, they will generate more cost-savings and compelling business cases for their customers.”

This contract will have interesting implications in the growing solutions and outsourcing battle between IBM and Hewlett-Packard, with HP’s new beau EDS having been awarded a seven-year, $715 million IT infrastructure outsourcing contract with Bristol-Myers Squibb just this past December.

Let’s keep the conversation going.

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