I was reading an article about how measuring Average Handle Time (AHT) in a Financial Services company, did not allow a very eager Financial Services Agent to provide the best service she could have provided a customer.

The customer wanted to do something on the Financial Services company online website, but the Average Handle Time (AHT) metric did not allow her to spend more time on the phone with the customer, and give him more information that would have made his online interaction with the company's website easier. Seems like that would brought the AHT metric for the whole center, as well as that particular agent down. So she had to bite her tongue and not tell the customer about something that would have prevented frustration on his part in the first phone call even though she knew about it! When he tried doing what he wanted to do, he could not and has to call them again on the phone!

The center explained that they were trying to increase the Customer Satisfaction KPI and if the AHT value goes up, the Customer Satisfaction KPI might suffer because that meant someone else was waiting to be serviced. However the above customer who had to call back again, would definitely would have brought that measurement down anyway!

So they may not have achieved anything more than frustrating an important customer!

Measurement and Reporting of KPIs should also identify these kinds of outliers, or exceptional cases, and allow them to be included in the analysis of the KPI performance. Metrics drive behavior and your interpretation of metrics should not enable the driving of undesirable behavior, eventually!

Many time, once we put technologies and metrics together, we think we have put behavior on auto-pilot! We may have automated the driving of undesired outcomes, rather than the desired ones instead! They are our tools and not ends in themselves. The ends, we will have to be very clear about and communicate them well!

Exceptions and outliers happen all the time and as long as we interpret metrics and measurements along with them, we should be fine!

The young man knows the rules but the old man knows the exceptions - Oliver Wendell Holmes

We recently held a conference where over 100 of our clients shared their outsourcing and offshoring experiences. The event brimmed with great lessons and examples.

Being a measurement guy, I couldn't resist comparing this year's event with one we held last year at which a CIO expressed some anxiety about what he deemed the increasing tendency to "take offshore our American jobs."

At this year's gathering, that anxiety was still on display. But attendees arrived at larger conclusions about what offshoring truly means in a global economy – who benefits and why.

One attendee called my attention to a survey by the German Marshall Fund, the American policy group that promotes cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. That survey showed around 75% of Europeans and 71% of Americans welcome international trade. (Germany, a major exporter, had the highest acceptance rate at 83%). Yet even though many people generally welcome the free flow of goods and services around the globe, they still fear that such liberalization will, on balance, mean job losses. That's particularly true in the U.S., where the looming presidential election is only turning up the volume on the rhetoric around the issue.

This is why I'm pleased to report that most of the discussion at the conference this year was about moving work, not jobs. Attendees were focused on how organizations can gain access to new sources of expertise to help meet business goals and grow. For these professionals, it isn't about cutting or transferring headcount. It's about improving operations.

Perhaps this is proof of a fundamentally sounder global economy – one in which demands for capacity and skills prompt executives to look for new sources of capability. It feels that way to me.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a facinating article SAP’s Plan to Globalize Hits Cultural Barriers (Subscription Required).

This facinating brief history of recent events recounts how Hasso Plattner, CEO of SAP bought an Israeli Company. And along with it, came Shai Agassi to SAP, a very vibrant entrepreneur who had built software companies and sold them by the time he was 24.

Till then all of SAP’s software was made in Walldorf, 50 miles south of Frankfurt, all by German Engineers, who preferred to do things slow and deliberately with a lot of thought; with "german engineering" to be precise.

This was just before, during and after the Dot Com boom. Shai Agassi was pushing for a lot of change within SAP, the way they did products, etc. Shai Agassi wanted a lot of products developed quickly and he had a 100 products in 100 days goal once as opposed to the slow, deliberate way in which SAP was used to do things.

At this time, Shai Agassi got a series of promotions and he started building up a lot of executives in Palo Alto while building multiple software development groups in the US, India and China. SAP wanted to get more English into their company culture since they were selling a lot to English speaking countries (may be 80% of it or more?- my own question).

The article talks about the differences in dealing with US, German, Indian and Chinese engineers. Indian engineers wanted a lot of interactions while Germans preferred to be left alone. US executives needed more speed in execution than German ones.

Engineers in Germany almost formed a sort of a union but Hasso Plattner is committed to Globalization. He preferred to increase head counts elsewhere in the US, India and China faster than in Germany but promised to keep the headcount in Germany constant and reassigning people there.

Meanwhile Shai Agassi left the company recently since Hasso Plattner’s second in command seemed likely to get the CEO position rather than Shai Agassi.

Fascinating article! Has a lot of lessons for companies still struggling with country based identities. Particularly US companies that seem to think that labor costs are the only reason to be in India or China, ignoring their vast markets given the potential in growth for their middle classes. In the future, both the markets for companies as well as labor pools will be increasingly diffuse throughout the world. Learning to deal with where your markets are and where your labor pools are and how to deal with them are not options. And they are creeping up on you faster than you think!

CIO Insight Blogger Allan Alter writes with a provocative title about a new Forrester Group Study of Captive Offshoring Centers - Captive Offshoring Centers are Imploding.

Allan cites the Research Study saying that the cost per person per month of a Captive Offshoring Center is about $4,944 as compared to a Third Party Service Provider at about $4,321. He also cites rising costs, turnover problems, lack of integration, etc. in justifying his title that captive centers are imploding!

I wonder if he took into account a recent trend in many parent companies in spinning out their captive centers, and MAKING A LOT OF MONEY out of them as GE did a few years ago with their GENPACT unit in India. With the amount of investment money available from very large investors like Carlyle Group, The Blackstone Group and General Atlantic Partners, saving money may not be the only motive in creating Captive Offshoring Centers. Some create new companies out of them and end up selling pieces of them or the entire organization!

Interesting facts and even more interesting observations!

Here's a thoughtful blog entry by Rob Walling, a .NET programmer, on BearingPoint's newest global development center, which will be based in Hattiesburg, MS. He asks several questions of his readers, regarding the merits of moving development work to low-cost areas and whether they'd consider work that took them there.

What enriches the piece are the additions offered in the comment section, from the software engineer in Mobile, Alabama who writes, "...nobody wants to work in the South," to the anonymous poster who links over to an interview with a person running a high tech company out of Bozeman, Montana and who pays wages double the county average.