My intent with this blog is to have a conversation about both current state as well as the future direction of B2B Managed Services, and so I’d like to begin by offering a view of what a B2B Managed Service actually is.  

I’ll begin with the name “Managed Services.” Is this merely the current Marketing label? A term cloned to counter the baggage often associated with the term “outsourcing”?    This seems to be the view taken by Gartner in their review published 12-July-07. While Gartner clearly prefers the term ‘outsourcing” I find myself wondering “what’s in the name?”  As Juliet said long ago “What’s in a name, that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.    What ever it (the solution, product, service) is called, I submit that what matters more is what it actually does for the customer.  As Peter Drucker observed, “what a customer buys and considers value is never just a product.  It is always a utility, that is, what the product or service does for him.”   

So what does a B2B Managed Services do?  As I see it there are 2 central functions to a B2B Managed Service:  Data Transmission, and Data Translation. Of course this is a B2B Managed Service both of these functions presume interaction with Trading Partners.   By Data Transmission I refer to all the methods, protocols, means, of moving business data from one organization to another.  Messaging is another word often used here, but at the end of the day, the order, the invoice, the ASN, payment instruction, needs to get from one organization to another.  And here is where a lot of techno-alphabet soup appears (FTP, SFTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, AS1, AS3, AS3,  VPN, SMTP, S/MIME, etc.).  Data transmission must also encompass the security protocols and methodology needed to assure the right data is delivered in the right way.   Data Translation, on the other hand, encompasses the processing necessary to render the message sent into something that can be used by the recipient.  Here of course is where a whole different set of abbreviations come into play (EDI, XML, EDIFACT, ANSI, RosettaNet, TWIST etc. )  Translation is more than a1:1 conversion of data across formats, it also includes data enrichment, enhancement, and validation.   

I wonder as I begin this blog – are there any core components of a B2B Managed (or outsourced) Service which don’t fall into either Data Transmission, or Data Translation function?   Stay tuned and join the conversation.