Recently, KPMG published a report on ‘Top trends and predictions for 2015 and beyond’. It is a quarterly review of global business services and market trends.

The research was conducted among 800+ KPMG sourcing advisors, 20 leading global business IT and cloud services providers and additional 300+ KPMG executives.

Let’s see what was identified:

The most positive impact on user organisation has the ‘access to innovative technologies’, named by 57% of advisors and 71% of service providers. The latter also want to focus on improving consumer demand (63%).

What was identified as a factor having negative impact on user organisations is talent shortage. This year spins around obtaining these talents, since there is a perceptible deficiency of them in the companies. The above mentioned problem has been recognised among 55% of advisors and 52% of service providers.

Another problem is the result of weak global or regional economies which don’t bring enough financial input (53% of advisors and 78% of service providers).

The report also examined user organisations initiatives. Reduction of operating costs lead in the chart, since 71% of advisors and 83% of service providers are concerned about them. Second priority is improvement in new information technologies (53% of advisors and 58% of service providers). The same number of respondents also want to redesign their core business processes.

When it comes to the challenges related to effectively carrying out the above mentioned initiatives, lack of talents appears to be a new top-challenge this year and has been noticed by 53% of advisors and 50% of service providers. Most advisors worry about dysfunctional organisational processes, whereas service providers are concerned about inadequate IT infrastructure and inability to innovate.

The primary concern here is that while many global companies are doubling down on cutting operating costs, many of them may be ignoring opportunities to move their organizations up the Global Business Services (GBS) maturity curve (…). At the same time, we were surprised, particularly because of the acute talent shortages being faced by many of these companies, that ‘finding, attracting and retaining talent globally’ was not cited by advisors as one of the top initiatives being undertaken by global clients. Companies that find themselves fixated solely on cutting costs may ultimately find themselves falling further behind their competitors who are migrating to GBS operating models and positioning themselves to create significantly greater value across their organizations.(…)”

David Brown, Global Lead Shared Services & Outsourcing Advisory

In summary, most organisations are competing in the so-called ‘War for talent’, which could be resolved by undertaking and managing their current resources. Also, new-technologies should be implemented quicker because first-mover advantage (the advantage earned by the first important occupant of a market segment) is real. Big Data and IT are the leading tendencies that can help organisations cope with the challenges simultaneously making them front-runners.