K. I. S. S.  –it’s a well worn acronym “Keep it simple s____” (you can fill this one in) –it’s the advice given by every speech teacher I ever had, and one which we all wish would be applied to the tax code.

22,400,000. The number of results from a Google search on “Managed Services”.  Managed Services is getting more and more attention and support.  Research firms, (Gartner, AMR, Forrester, to name a few) and academic centers –Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum, are publishing their findings.  Organizations Automotive, Retail, Financial Services, Consumer Products, and Manufacturing are adopting a ‘Managed Services’ model as part of their business to business strategies .   

SaaS,  PaaS,  B2Bi,  SOA, Hosting, EDI, XML, RONET, ISO, AS2, https, etc.   With all the acronyms  and all the results, can we really KISS Managed Services?  

Sure – by focusing on the values.    All of the functions, capabilities, drivers, and demands around managed services are contained in 5 basic values:  Reliability, Security, Interoperability, Scalability and Supportability.  Each value is really the answer to a basic question – as I’ve listed below

1)      Reliable:  Is it working?

2)      Secure:   Is it safe?

3)      Interoperable: Can everyone use it?

4)      Scalable:  Will it grow?

5)      Supportable:  If it breaks, (or bends) can I fix it?

There’s a lot of literature about what comprises these each of these values, and multiple approaches to providing them.  By driving to these values MS and KISS come together.

One of the key value propositions for B2B Outsourcing is the ROI gained fromcontracting for B2B expertise and infastructure at a lower TCO than keeping all the people and infastructure in-house.   I’m not going to re-hash ROI model here as the growth of Managed Services sales (and those selling these solutions) is increasing significantly.   Instead I want to think about what it would take to deliver an outsourced Managed Service using the SaaS model.

 Let’s take the Data Translation component.  To fully leverage an SaaS model you’d need to provide an on-line interface to allow a user to define their input data, output data and the relationships between the two.  It would have to have drag and drop features so you could take the data values from the source format and place them in the target format.  You’d also need to be able to define the structure of the source and target formats.   The more I think about this  the more it sounds like taking an EDI translator software and hooking up a web-based front end to it.     You’d also want to have a facility to upload test data, run the translation, and validate the results.    

But if I’m doing all this defintion, testing and validation . . .where is the outsourcing?  So far this sounds like a lower cost of way of acquiring the translation software necessary for a B2B program - not outsourcing.

My fellow blogger Melanie has been waxing eloquently on both the state of grace which can be achieved by effective B2B data management only to reminded by another fellow blogger John about how far there still is to go in the integration space.

Both of these posts re-enforce (and refine with far more eloquence than I can muster) the motto of B2B Managed Services  – Make it Work.

John’s right there is a long way to go, and I was quite surprised to read the results of a recent Survey   that when asked what the #1 technology used to synchronize (sounds like integrate to me) with customers on orders forecast and industry status – the #1 answer (34%) was e-mail.  The #2 answer was (32%) was EDI so perhaps that means e-mail is used to handle the exceptions arising from the gaps still inherent in using EDI.

Since EDI still represents 85-90% of B2B transaction volume (Forrester Research 6-July 2007) the journey towards the kingdom of data heaven may be longer  than any of us think.   But take heart!  There is a road to get there.  It’s called Managed Services – using Data Transmission and Data Translation (the foundational components of B2B Managed Services) organization will be collaborate to exchange their business data , mange it’s quality and be able to take the steps to integrate into their business process.  

SaaS – Software as a Service is huge -A quick Google produced 1,620,000,000 hits.  Even SAP is jumping on the SaaS bandwagon – although not large customers.  (SAP Big business won’t be interested )

SAP is making the bet they can deliver ERP services using a SaaS model to small clients (100-500 employees.)  What struck me most about this announcement is the competing view from Larry Ellison    Larry Ellison Says No To SaaS – namely that he doesn’t see how he can create a business models using SaaS as a delivery

So what about a B2B Managed Service?  Can the core elements of Data Transmission and Data Translation between trading partners be delivered via an SaaS model? 

I’m really not that into fashion - just ask my co-workers, but my wife and daughter really enjoy ‘Project Runway’.   If you’ve seen the show at all you’ll have heard Tim Gunn use the title phrase of this blog.  “Make it Work”.

I’m told, not being a fan of the show, Tim says to the contestants when they express  their concern about how much time they have left to finish sewing something.

“Make it Work’.  To me this sounds like the ideal motto for managed services.  I’m sure it’s at least the goal of every B2B Managed Service project.

In my experience B2B projects and programs begin with a grand vision of the benefits (increased client satisfaction, accelerated revenue recognition, enhanced marketing prestige etc.) which will be realized when the project goes live.   But somewhere between launch and production, reality set’s in, and project team(s) need to rise to challenge and “make it work”.   Ideally the vision and reality would be aligned from the outset, but I haven’t seen that yet, have you?

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.