Step aside Magic Quadrant, hello Blueprint

After three years of hard labor, we, at HfS, are proud to launch our first “HfS Blueprint” that we believe is the revolutionary crowdsourced methodology for evaluating business and IT service providers.  

The industry has been literally screaming at us to change the way analyst firms portray their assessments of service provider performance, and we’ve dug deep to leverage our massive community, our extensive buyer relationships and demand data, to facilitate what we truly believe is a major game-changer in the research analyst industry:  The HfS Blueprint.

Finally:  A genuine way to assess services providers that isn’t reliant on the arbitrary viewpoint of a single analyst;

Finally: A credible methodology to gauge the performance of service providers against “real” innovation and execution capabilities;

Finally: A performance assessment of providers that apportions importance weightings of each innovation and execution category based on data from our State of Outsourcing survey, conducted with the support of KPMG, covering 1355 enterprise buyers, influencers, advisors and provider executives;

Finally: A performance assessment of providers where exhaustive inputs from buyers and influencers shape the scoring (not solely a handful of rose-tinted client references from the providers themselves);

Finally: A customizable assessment tool where enterprise buyers can re-calibrate the weightings to assess their provider-fit based on their own unique needs.

Yes indeed – we threatened these Blueprints five months ago, and we’re now ready to launch the first one… in  the much vaunted, but still immature, market of Finance and Accounting BPO, which is currently growing at a double-digit clip:

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Unfortunately, we can’t leave this Blueprint Axis up here for more than a few days, but we thought it important to reveal to the industry how this revolutionary process has worked.

We are happy to discuss the Blueprint methodology in greater detail (drop us a note here) but essentially, in this example for F&A BPO, we assessed data from 745 live multi-process F&A BPO engagements to ascertain provider market shares, depth of client base, breath of execution and geographic scope of delivery.  We then conducted exhaustive interviews with multiple buyers and market advisors to help score providers against each other across all the sub-categories of the Blueprint using ExpertChoice, an advanced statistical analytics platform. We also received a tremendous amount of cooperation from (almost) all of the providers above, as we went through this exhaustive process to understand their concrete plans for the future, get really deep with their current client relationships, their overall vision and their appetite to evolve into higher-value areas of F&A BPO.

Congratulations to the Winners Circle and the chasing pack of High Performers… we’ll see how the picture has shifted in 2014!

Thanks to all who took part – you’ve helped create a little bit if research history.

Readers can download the full HfS Blueprint methodology by clicking here.

(Cross-posted @ Horses for Sources)