InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 5, 1999
Centralized Staffing
Investment bank outsources hiring of contract staff to Computer Horizons
For Michael Willis, managing director-IT at the investment bank, centralizing the management of staffing vendors and contracts for the 75 IT managers who work with the bank's lines of business is working beautifully. Willis' IT managers now have more time to work on projects, economies of scale have been brought to staff sourcing, and Warburg has a better handle the staffing market. Details of all the vendor contracts are available to Willis from a Web browser that accesses the Computer Horizons' system. Previously, he says, "contract management was decentralized, and negotiation and administration was as good as the individual manager."
Better Bargaining
A similar system, PeopleMover Inc.'s Talent Scout, now in beta and scheduled for general availability this fall, is focused on serving IT organizations as well as IT consulting firms that need to quickly mobilize and demobilize teams for IT projects. Also, Vivant is finishing the beta version of its Contractor Workforce Management workflow and decision-support software, which includes an online database service to provide comprehensive market data on IT staffing services.
Computer Task Group and Analysts International also offer similar services, says John Bace, a research director at Gartner Group. These services and tools, which Bace says help consolidate market information and balance skills resources, are emerging now because IT organizations need to become more efficient and better able to predict the skills and staffing they require.
Not all of Warburg Dillon Read's other IT vendors initially welcomed Computer Horizons' role as an intermediary for the investment bank. At first, some companies cried foul, says Dean Robbins, a VP at Computer Horizons and the account manager for the centralized vendor-management relationship with Warburg Dillon Read.
"But we are a separate organization," he says, "and we can demonstrate to clients and vendors that everything is fair, that nothing happens behind the scenes."
Photo by Robert Houser
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T managers at Warburg Dillon Read, the investment banking arm of UBS AG of Switzerland, can no longer tap just any staffing service vendor to help hire contract staff. Instead, the bank has turned to another IT services vendor, Computer Horizons Corp., to handle all details of hiring supplemental staff, from issuing requests for procurement to reviewing resumés to managing contracts.
Contract employees represent about 20% of the 500 IT employees at the investment bank's operations in the United States, and had been provided by more than 60 vendors. Now, with Computer Horizons handling all contract staff procurement requests and broadcasting them to a list of 15 preferred vendors, "we have better bargaining leverage and a genuine temperature check on market rates."
Warburg Dillon Read is one of six clients for the two-year-old centralized vendor-management service from Computer Horizons, which supports its service with Computer Horizons Information Management Efficiency System (Chimes), a proprietary human-resources supply-chain system based on an Oracle database and delivered over the Web.
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