The traditional model of outsourcing was typically based on writing long-term contracts for a fully-configured managed service following a competitive bidding process, with the provider’s expectation that they would bid low to occupy the territory and then make real money on variations and locked-in growth.

This approach is gradually breaking down as the commodity IAAS and SAAS markets mature.

The public sector and large corporates are looking to exploit economies of scale across their back-office functions, and then concentrate their internal resources on the value-added systems that either give competitive advantage or deliver genuine changes in working methods.

However there are still significant barriers to overcome in terms of specifying requirements in terms of business outcomes, rather than detailed functionality.

A simple example of this is the State of California’s choice of a Microsoft Cloud solution which created a strong reaction from other suppliers as the specification was written too closely to reflect Microsoft product features, generating a hearty response from Google on the relative merits of their approach to email search.

Once committed to a particular solution set, then the lock-in implications start raising unexpected constraints and commercial challenges. Microsoft suits have not really changed their spots!

Acting as commodity service brokers is a growing opportunity for systems integrators and larger IT departments. In this model a range of cloud services are combined into a portfolio that provide some degree of local choice and a bias towards pay-by-use rather than an annual ‘all-inclusive’ fee.

There is still a gap in the provision of automated charging models for SAAS and IAAS, which adds to the overhead of managing the service integration and support; often leading to a much higher overall cost than envisaged.

The traditional large-scale providers of managed services are trying to adapt to these new approaches, but with limited success to date.

The root cause of their malaise is in the predominance of clever technologists that prefer to offer bespoke solutions than live within the limitations of typical cloud platform architectures.

In some instances there may be lucrative proprietary solution sets or partnership agreements that are hard to unwind, especially where margin is threatened. The sales-force may have to be trimmed and retrained to reflect these new competitive realities.

While the industry is grappling with these issues, business users are going on a binge with personal devices and high-speed wireless networks.

There is an increasing mismatch between their experience within the office and outside, with less and less tolerance of the high-cost, locked-down misery of many architectures that are based on traditional Microsoft desktops and wired networks.

A new breed of CIOs just will not accept the prospect of yet another Windows release and server platform upgrade.

Application platforms that are not channel independent out of the box will be rejected.

The requirements for business agility on an international stage combined with a desire to exploit more infrastructure independence and reduce high-cost fixed assets will squeeze old-style corporate IT budgets.

In this sense the debate is no longer about internal or external provision of IT services.

CIOs who are not starting to adopt some commodity cloud services, grappling with all the challenges and risks they present, will soon be unemployable.

Suppliers that are already experienced in the management of IAAS and SAAS offerings will have a bright future as they work with the new breed of CIOs to help revolutionise the businesses they serve.

The economics of this new approach will make legacy retention unaffordable, in spite of vested interests and the business costs of change.

via The Death of Traditional IT Outsourcing – Welcome to the Transputec Blogs. | Transputec.

Sainsbury’s Bank is embarking on a three-and-a-half year project to move its customers off the systems of Lloyds Banking Group following the retailer’s £248m acquisition of the bank’s 50% shareholding.

The project will see Sainsbury’s move from the Lloyds systems to off-the-shelf systems and services from FIS. Sainsbury’s Bank will provide customer call centre services in-house. Sainsbury’s Bank profits over the past 12 months increased 38% from £16m to £22m.

“The transition will involve the transfer of data from legacy Lloyds Banking Group systems to the latest generation banking platform,” Sainsbury’s said in a statement. “This platform will allow a greater degree of flexibility, enabling new product launches and facilitating a much improved digital offer to customers.”

Peter Griffiths, CEO at Sainsbury’s Bank, said: “Introducing [FIS] is a major step forward in our evolution as we become a wholly owned Bank. We are delighted to be working with FIS, an expert in the field. We are very pleased with its domain expertise and the extensive functionality delivered by its banking and payments solutions.”

via Sainsbury’s outsources banking following £248m deal with Lloyds.

Now thanks to a new paper by Nathan Hodas and his colleagues, we can add to this humbling stats lesson the fact that for most users of Twitter, our followers and followees (the people we choose to follow), are better connected, more active, and more interesting than we are.

Hodas’ team analysed Twitter data from the second half of 2009 featuring 476 million tweets and 5.8 million users, with 193.3 million links between them. First off, they found that for most of us, the people we choose to follow are better connected – that is, they typically follow ten times as many people as we do. Our followers too are better connected, typically by a factor of twenty.

Seeing as we choose how many other people we want to follow, this first observation isn’t such a blow to the ego. However, the researchers found a similar result for popularity. That is, the people who follow us are typically ten times more popular than we are (in terms of their own follower count). Less surprising, the people we choose to follow are also more popular than we are. Here there are two distinct groupings – in one, the people we follow are typically ten times as popular as us; in the other, they are typically 10,000 times as popular (this is thanks to celebrity accounts and such like).

Not only are our followers and the people we follow better connected and more popular than we are, the people we follow are also usually more active. Eighty-eight per cent of users were found to be less active than a typical person they followed; this rose to 99 per cent when omitting accounts that ceased activity during the period covered by the data. This is probably because we’re more likely to follow accounts that are more visible by virtue of being more active.

A related observation was the link between activity and popularity – that is, more active users tended to be more popular, a correlation the researchers described as “especially strong”. This suggests being more active on Twitter could be a simple way to gain more popularity, although we need to be cautious because there’s no proof here for a causal link. “The detailed mechanism for this explanation is not yet clear,” the researchers admitted.

To connectivity, popularity and activity, we can add interestingness. The researchers looked at the “virality” of links shared on Twitter – literally how many times they were re-tweeted. Here they found that 79 per cent of Twitter users posted less viral content than the people they follow.

Another issue the researchers looked at was what they called “information overload”. Here they found that as the number of people we follow increases, the information that we’re subjected to increases “super-linearly” – each new user that we follow typically equals hundreds of new items of information in our Twitter stream. In part this is because, as we heard, the people we follow are usually highly active (or at least more active than we are). The risk is that we end up subscribing to more information than we can possibly manage to consume.

This last point about overload is relevant to readers hoping to boost their popularity and interestingness on Twitter.  Comparing overloaded Twitter users (the third receiving the most amounts of info), and the underloaded (the bottom third), Hodas and his colleagues found that the overloaded tended to receive information that had gone massively viral, but tended to overlook ”mini-cascades” – information that had viral potential. “It appears that overloaded users are only good detectors for information of mid-range interestingness,” the researchers said. “Most likely the information that their friends already know.” This suggests that if you want to be the kind of user who helps to break the next big story on Twitter, you need to be careful not to follow too many accounts in the pursuit of this aim. Pick and choose who you follow with care.

“If you have ever felt like your friends are more interesting or more active than you are,” the researchers concluded, “it seems the statistics confirm this to be true for the vast majority of us.”

_________________________________

Nathan O. Hodas, Farshad Kooti, and Kristina Lerman (2013). Friendship Paradox Redux: Your Friends Are More Interesting Than You. arXiv arXiv: 1304.3480v1

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/SocxuS6n-wQ/why-your-friends-on-twitter-are.html

The researchers tested 16 atheists and 13 religious people (Finns aged 17 to 45 recruited via a skeptics group and bible group, respectively). The participants were wired up to a skin conductance machine that records the sweatiness of the fingers – a basic marker of stress. Next the participants read aloud 36 sentences – some were requests for God to do something awful; others were offensive statements not involving God (e.g. it’s okay to kick a puppy in the face); and the remainder were neutral (e.g. I hope it’s not raining today).

The participants’ views about this experience differed as you’d expect. The religious folk found the God-related statements more unpleasant than the atheists. However, they were no more likely than the atheists to refuse to utter the God statements, or to retract them later when given the chance. Most importantly, skin conductance was higher for both participant groups when reading the God statements compared with the neutral statements. Moreover, across both groups, skin conductance when reading the God statements did not vary according to a person’s level of religious belief. The atheists seemed to get just as stressed as believers when daring God to do awful things.

An obvious flaw in this evidence is that the mention of God was confounded with horrible outcomes. Perhaps the atheists were stressed reading the God statements simply because of the ideas involved, not because of God’s role per se. A second study examined this with nineteen more Finnish atheists (aged 20 to 30). The participants were wired up to the skin conductance machine while they uttered unpleasant sentences involving God (e.g. “I dare God to make me die of cancer”) or not involving God (e.g. “I wish I would die of cancer”). Signs of stress were higher for the God statements, suggesting the involvement of God brings some extra stress to atheists beyond the unpleasant outcomes involved.

“The results imply that while atheists’ and religious individuals’ beliefs about God and explicit attitudes towards God statements are different, they become equally emotionally aroused when daring God to do unpleasant things,” the researchers said.

The study has its limitations – the participant samples were very small for a start – and the findings are difficult to interpret. Certainly it would be inappropriate to conclude that the results prove atheists believe in God at a subconscious level. Other plausible explanations for the findings include atheists finding the God statements stressful because they know friends or family who do believe in God; or perhaps atheists experience stress reading the God statements because the wording implies God is real, which runs counter to their own beliefs.

_________________________________

Lindeman, M., Heywood, B., Riekki, T., and Makkonen, T. (2013). Atheists become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.771991

–Further reading–
The unscientific thinking that forever lingers in the minds of physics professors
Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention
The children of securely attached mothers think that God is close
Can God make people more aggressive?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/osp5_mlTqaU/atheists-as-stressed-as-believers-when.html

Working memory describes our ability to hold relevant information in mind for use in mental tasks, while ignoring irrelevant information. If it were possible to improve our working memory capacity and discipline through training, it makes sense that this would have widespread benefits. But that’s a big if.

A new meta-analysis by Monica Melby-Lervåg and Charles Hulme has just been published in the February issue of the respected APA journal Developmental Psychology, which combined the results from 23 studies of working memory training completed up to 2011 (PDF is freely available). To be included, studies had to compare outcomes for a working memory training treatment group against outcomes in a control group. Most of the studies available are on healthy adults or children, with just a few involving children with developmental conditions such as ADHD.

The results were absolutely clear. Working memory training leads to short-term gains on working memory performance on tests that are the same as, or similar to, those used in the training. “However,” Melby-Lervåg and Hulme write, “there is no evidence that working memory training produces generalisable gains to the other skills that have been investigated (verbal ability, word decoding, arithmetic), even when assessments take place immediately after training.”

There was a modest, short-term benefit of the training on non-verbal intelligence but this disappeared when only considering the studies with a robust design (i.e. those that randomised participants across conditions and which enrolled control participants in some kind of activity). Similarly, there was a modest benefit of the training on a test of attentional control, but this disappeared at follow-up.

All of this suggests that working memory training isn’t increasing people’s working memory capacity in such a way that they benefit whenever they engage in any kind of task that leans on working memory. Rather, people who complete the training simply seem to have improved at the specific kinds of exercises used in the training, or possibly even just at computer tasks – effects which, anyway, wear off over time.

Overall, Melby-Lervåg and Hulme note that the studies that have looked at the benefits of working memory training have been poor in design. In particular, they tend not to bother enrolling the control group in any kind of intervention, which means any observed benefits of the working memory training could be related simply to the fun and expectations of being in a training programme, never mind the specifics of what that entails. Related to that, some dubious studies reported far-reaching benefits of the working memory training, without finding any improvements in working memory, thus supporting the notion that these benefits had to do with participant expectations and motivation.

A problem with all meta-analyses, this one included, is that they tend to rely on published studies, which means any unpublished results stuck in a filing cabinet get neglected. But of course, it’s usually negative results that get left in the drawer, so if anything, the current meta-analysis presents an overly rosy view of the benefits of working memory training.

Melby-Lervåg and Hulme’s ultimate conclusion was stark: “there is no evidence that these programmes are suitable as methods of treatment for children with developmental cognitive disorders or as ways of effecting general improvements in adults’ or children’s cognitive skills or scholastic achievements.”

_________________________________

Melby-Lervåg M, and Hulme C (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental psychology, 49 (2), 270-91 PMID: 22612437 Free, full PDF of the study.


–NB.–
This meta-analysis only took in reviews published up to 2011. If you know of any quality studies into the effects of working memory training published since that time, please do share the relevant links via comments. 


–Further reading–
Brain training games don’t work.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/pBxaDXocOiw/working-memory-training-does-not-live.html

Now Brent Coker has conducted a pair of studies and his main finding suggests that we remain impressed after reading early positive reviews, even if negative reviews come later. It’s a finding that could help us be more objective when reading review pages, and it will surely also be of interest to marketeers and PR professionals hoping to give their products an advantage.

Seventy-six undergrads were told all positive facts about one fictional coffee brand and all negative facts about another, along the lines of: “the company has put green policies in place” and “the company has tried to cover up exploitation of its workers”. Pictures illustrated the facts.

Next a research assistant told the participants that a mistake had been made – the fact sheets had been wrongly labelled, so that the positive statements actually applied to other coffee brand and vice versa. They were asked to imagine the sheets had been labelled correctly and then say how they felt about the two companies. Their responses were compared against the ratings of a control group for whom the reversal wasn’t made.

The key finding here was that the impact of the early positive facts lingered, leading to enhanced ratings for the brand that was originally misdescribed in glowing terms. In contrast, the stain of negative facts wore off. The brand originally misdescribed in negative terms was given fair ratings by the participants, as if they were able to forget the mistaken negative associations.

A second study tested this principle with online reviews for an LA hotel. Two hundred and eighty undergrads read five Trip Advisor reviews for the hotel, either ordered so that they went from positive to negative, or from negative to positive. The participants showed more favour for the hotel when they read the more positive reviews first, again showing how the impact of early positive reviews appears to linger. This remained the case even when the reviews were labelled such that they appeared to have been written over the course of a year (so giving the impression that the hotel had deteriorated during that time).

“This research documented evidence of asymmetrical affective perseverance when consumers form attitudes towards brands,” Coker concluded. “… Consumers may overshoot their judgments towards brands when positive information is replaced with negative information.”

_________________________________

Coker, B. (2012). Seeking the opinions of others online: Evidence of evaluation overshoot. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33 (6), 1033-1042 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2012.06.005

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/9G5GXOTGaoI/the-psychology-of-online-reviews.html

Some types of activities are quite easily outsourced to another company specializing in the tasks and who have backup or expertise should things go wrong. In this case when outsourcing involves moving the jobs to a new company the overall job level declines a little as efficiencies are sought and people are let go. However when the outsourcing involves off-shoring the jobs are actually moved outside the country boundaries. In this case the low skilled more repetitive jobs are moved to another country and those jobs within the country are effectively lost. And thus overall the job opportunities for that particular group of workers are reduced.

There is some evidence that if the outsourcing does achieve some sort of focus on value added resources or core competences there are increase job opportunities for those people involved in the coordination and management of the outsourced functions – and of course in the increased activity due to better overall economic performance. However this type of change in employment means that there is a shift away from repetitive low skilled tasks towards more high-level tasks demanding higher skill and education levels.

This can often mean that those people losing their jobs to outsourcing are sometimes not suitable for the new jobs created – and what one sees is a shift in overall profile of jobs within an industry. This is particularly important in situations where the workforce is essentially single skilled as in some industries in the UK. One aspect of this reduction in low skilled repetitive tasks is the loss of entry-level jobs, especially in information technology. In this case the entry-level jobs (typically given to new graduates) are lost and moved to the off-shoring country. This reduction in entry-level jobs has a short and long-term impact. In the short term the jobs are not available for graduate entries and in the long term the availability of people with organizational experience moving through the organization to take senior management positions is inhibited. What this means is the removal of entry-level jobs could have an impact on future senior management availability-the people are simply not there who have learned the ropes and come up through the mill and have developed a deep understanding of company processes and procedures.

The evidence is mixed and the jury is still of out whether outsourcing and off shoring cause reduction in job levels. There seems to be a change in job mix with a reduction of single skilled and entry-level jobs especially for new graduates and this longer term reduction in the available pool of experienced workers to actually run departments such as information technology will have impacts for the knowledge capital of organizations.

This means that we have to consider carefully as a country the long term impacts of outsourcing especially off-shoring in terms of the job opportunities given to younger people as they leave university. As well as the shift in employment patterns between lower skilled repetitive jobs (which are typically occupied by women for example in part-time jobs) – this could mean that specific sectors of society are effected differentially in the changing patterns of employment relations. The burden of outsourcing will fall on those workers least able to cope – the part-time, women workers and entry level employees.

see also…
Levine, L., (2011), Offshoring (or Offshore Outsourcing) and Job Loss Among U.S. Workers, Congressional Research Service
Jensen, P., Kirkegaard, J., Laugesen, N., (2009) Beyond job losses – The net effects of offshoring and inshoring on employment in the Danish economy, Strategic Outsourcing vol 2 no. 2

Eighty-six female undergrads arrived one at a time at a psychology lab for what they thought was an investigation into sex differences in reasoning and problem-solving. A female research assistant welcomed them and explained that they’d be interacting with a remote research team via computer. She then went and sat behind a partition in the same room. The three-person remote team were either all male or all female (this was clear from their names), and they proceeded to ask some basic questions of the participant via the computer.

Next, the research assistant’s mobile phone rang. It was obvious from her end of the conversation that it was her male plumber “Joe”. He’d moved some items in her house without asking – an act that the research assistant blamed either on his impatience or his sexist beliefs. After her call, the research assistant apologised to the participant, either saying “Sorry about that, my plumber is so impatient” or “Sorry about that – my plumber is such a typical man – he thinks that women are incapable of doing anything on their own!”.

After this, the participants began a 90-second anagram challenge on the computer. When the time was up, they had the chance to request help from the remote research team for any items they hadn’t solved. They also answered questions about their mood.

The key finding is that participants exposed to the story about the sexist plumber asked for less help on average, compared with participants who were told the plumber was merely impatient (they sought help with 48 per cent vs. 56 per cent of unsolved items). This held regardless of the sex of the remote research team (the source of the help). Another finding was that for participants exposed to the sexist plumber story, the more help they sought, the worst their mood. Conforming to the stereotype of the needy female appeared to make them feel rubbish about themselves.

“All in all,” the researchers concluded, “our findings underline the point that the benevolent sexism in everyday banal interactions can be consequential for women’s emotions and behaviour, and is therefore anything but banal.”

Critics may feel that the explicit view to which some of the participants were exposed – that “women are incapable of doing anything on their own” (emphasis added) – was not particularly subtle; that the results therefore say more about out and out sexism rather than benevolent sexism. It would also have been preferable to include a third condition in which the participants were not exposed to any overheard phone conversation.
_________________________________

Wakefield, J., Hopkins, N., and Greenwood, R. (2012). Thanks, But No Thanks: Women’s Avoidance of Help-Seeking in the Context of a Dependency-Related Stereotype Psychology of Women Quarterly, 36 (4), 423-431 DOI: 10.1177/0361684312457659

-Further resources-
Podcast featuring the lead author of this study discussing the findings.
“Let me help you with that” – how women suffer from benevolent sexism. 

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/D1dunIwTq64/benevolent-sexism-puts-women-off-asking.html

For example, in Outlook 2010, go to the home tab ‘File’ up on top left (first tab), and then select Options (usually on the bottom). When the options page opens select Email then click on the ‘Signatures’. Here you can create several signatures for different email addresses if you like or for different actions (like in a reply or in a forward). This way, you could have a certain ‘Sig Tag’ for your email groups and another one for your personal email and so on. For Outlook Express, go to Tools and then Options – then you click the Signatures tab on top of the box. In Outlook.com (new live mail) click on the ‘Gear Wheel’ on the right then select ‘More Email Settings’

A few things you want to remember when composing your signature:
1. Do not make it into a novel- no more than a few lines to get your message across.
2. Try to capture email addresses for follow-up sales and contacts if you have an ezine.
3. Offer something free that people can click and get – but make it as few clicks as possible.

Here are some examples of sigtags:
Sincerely,
RoyMogg
Free download will help increase sales
http://www.yoururl.com/downloadhere.pdf
Subscribe to my free ezine to help improve your biz
mailto:subscribe@mysite.com
————
Thank you,
RoyMogg
RoyMogg is a marketing specialist who has
written many successful ebooks. Check out
my latest ebook here and sign up for a free gift.
http://www.signuphere.com
————-
Warm regards,
RoyMogg
25% discount on all orders from this link. Click here
and get a free gift with your order and discount.
http://www.clickhere.com
—————
Don’t pass up the chance to advertise and/or promote your products and/or services with every email you send! Change your ‘sigtag’ periodically to feature your current specials or sales or holiday events.

Let’s do this today!

Cheers RoyMogg
Get My Blog by Email

Testing children aged around three to four years, the researchers first asked them whether they could be seen if they were wearing an eye mask, and whether the researcher could see another adult, if that adult was wearing an eye mask. Nearly all the children felt that they were hidden when they were wearing the mask, and most thought the adult wearing a mask was hidden too.

Next, Russell and his colleagues established whether children think it’s the fact that a person’s eyes are hidden from other people’s view that renders them invisible, or if they think it’s being blinded that makes you invisible. To test this, a new group of young kids were quizzed about their ability to be seen when they were wearing goggles that were completely blacked out, meaning they couldn’t see and their eyes were hidden, versus when they were wearing a different pair that were covered in mirrored film, meaning they could see, but other people couldn’t see their eyes.

This test didn’t go quite to plan because out of the 37 participating children, only 7 were able to grasp the idea that they could see out, but people couldn’t see their eyes. Of these 7, all bar one thought they were invisible regardless of which goggles they were wearing. In other words, the children’s feelings of invisibility seem to come from the fact that their eyes are hidden, rather than from the fact that they can’t see.

Now things get a little complicated. In both studies so far, when the children thought they were invisible by virtue of their eyes being covered, they nonetheless agreed that their head and their body were visible. They seemed to be making a distinction between their “self” that was hidden, and their body, which was still visible. Taken together with the fact that it was the concealment of the eyes that seemed to be the crucial factor for feeling hidden, the researchers wondered if their invisibility beliefs were based around the idea that there must be eye contact between two people – a meeting of gazes – for them to see each other (or at least, to see their “selves”).

This idea received support in a further study in which more children were asked if they could be seen if a researcher looked directly at them whilst they (the child) averted their gaze; or, contrarily, if the researcher with gaze averted was visible whilst the child looked directly at him or her. Many of the children felt they were hidden so long as they didn’t meet the gaze of the researcher; and they said the researcher was hidden if his or her gaze was averted whilst the child looked on.

“… it would seem that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet,” the researchers said.

Other explanations were ruled out with some puppet studies. For instance, the majority of a new group of children agreed it was reasonable for a puppet to hide by covering its eyes, which rules out the argument that children only hide this way because they are caught up in the heat of the moment.

The revelation that most young children think people can only see each other when their eyes meet raises some interesting questions for future research. For example, children with autism are known to engage in less sharing of attention with other people (following another person’s gaze), so perhaps they will be less concerned with the role of mutual gaze in working out who is visible. Another interesting avenue could be to explore the invisibility beliefs of children born blind.

_________________________________

Russell, J., Gee, B., and Bullard, C. (2012). Why Do Young Children Hide by Closing Their Eyes? Self-Visibility and the Developing Concept of Self. Journal of Cognition and Development, 13 (4), 550-576 DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2011.594826

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BpsResearchDigest/~3/OCVA6BF5hTs/why-do-children-hide-by-covering-their.html