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Page 82 GO IT ALONE!
business, which processes things like paychecks and health insurance, to keep growing. He anticipates that the nation’s largest firms will increasingly realize they cannot match the benefits Fidelity offers clients as a result of the billions of dollars each year that the company spends on technology. “Our value proposition is that you outsource to us and we’ll take care of the technology over time,” he told Reuters.
Case Study: A Lesson Learned
I learned the hard way that outsourcing is the way to go. In fact, one of the most significant mistakes I made with Speed Anywhere, early in the company’s life, was to spend money on what turned out to be useless software. As the firm was being established, I was approached by a friend who wanted to join the business as a partner. We agreed that he would undertake a variety of initiatives, including building a robust consumer DSL business. At the time, there was no one place where a consumer could go to reliably check on the availability of DSL from any of the potentially multiple providers. We found a developer who could create software that would automatically perform this task the night after we received the request from the consumer. The cost would be significant but affordable if we used a large portion of the cash the business was then throwing off. Although the business had the resources to fund this effort, those funds were not earmarked as part of our budget for experiments (which was far smaller). In the early days of the company, this was been our most substantial investment, and I assumed it would pay off. We envisioned consumers visiting the site on, say, a Tuesday and receiving an e-mail from us on Wednesday morning telling them where they could find a DSL provider in their area. The software worked, but we discovered that our basic concept was
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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