Brown sauce and HRO in Europe

I have just put the phone down on my third business conversation this Sunday morning, hardly having had time to digest my bacon and eggs garnished of course with brown sauce; we Brits like that kind of saucy delicacy even though the famous HP brand of sauce is now owned by the French ? horror of horrors! Anyway, all three apparently urgent conversations were about the same thing.

This HRO stuff is really lifting off in Europe and according to my correspondents, none of them have had time to breathe in January, as their business development teams came back with more interest in this first month of 2005 than they had the entire last quarter of the previous year.

So who is going to dominate the sector in Europe over the next few years? All three said the same. IBM, Accenture and CapGemini, with ACS, EDS and others following behind. And don't forget HP, if it can get its act together quickly enough with its nascent European BPO business. Will Carly really do what she says and invest some of the gains from the inevitable sale of her printer business, in BPO services?

All reasonable guesses I suppose, but what about good firms with solid reputations like Hewitt/Exult, ADP, Arinso and Convergys? And what about Fidelity as it makes a grab for European property in bringing its HRO business to Europe? True, they said, ?but don't forget that the big deals will be for the biggest firms. At the end of the day the largest organizations, in the corporate world and in the public sector, prefer to do business with people like themselves.?

A wise business associate told me a while back, ?if ever worst comes to the worst, large firms like to know that they can sue someone.? Not the kind of pessimistic view I would necessarily subscribe to, especially as a migrant from a very large firm to a small entrepreneurial organization, but I think I understand what she was getting at. Still in this fast developing space there is plenty of room for a second tier HRO business to tackle the largest market, mid-size multi-national corporations, which in Europe means corporates with five thousand to 15,000 employees.

Having listened patiently, at least what I call patiently, to their excited ramblings, I asked my callers what they thought would become of all these HR people displaced from their former roles. My question was stimulated by Peter Drucker's 1999 feature in Harvard Business Review that was re-published this January. Entitled 'Managing Oneself' the piece focuses on the need for people to take responsibility for managing their futures. Drucker emphasises that we have to stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do.

It strikes me how reluctant some of the HR people that I meet seem to be to take the time to understand and embrace the change that HRO means for their organizations and for themselves. Do they think it's just a fad and that when the fuss dies down it will all go away? History tells us that ignoring the inevitable or burying your head in the sand is no way to react to fundamental change.

If you think I am exaggerating, ask yourself why all those HRO providers think that the decision on HRO will be made by the CEO or the CFO and not by the head of HR? It's because only the best HR executives, who would be at the top of their specialty, whatever they would have chosen to specialize in, have the wisdom and capacity to embrace HRO. They adapt what they do and how they do it to the changing needs of their organizations. I pleaded with my three callers to do what they could to encourage their HR contacts to face reality rather than irrelevance and possible extinction.

So this is my plea to you ? work within your organizations and ensure that your HR teams understand the challenge and stay in touch with HRO. You can't kill it, so make sure you prosper with it. As for all of you members and leaders of HR associations, it's time to stop protecting the status quo. In the US, with several large associations you are in better shape than in Europe, where with the exception of the CIPD in the UK, we have few strong national HR associations and so little chance of using their influence to change the future of HR.

Back to the brown sauce. Brits used to use it to spice up their otherwise bland traditional cooking ? note it was never known as 'cuisine' until recent years with the belated arrival of top continental chefs. Now brown sauce is just a habit ? rock on Danone!