Ross Wilkers
Rochester, N.Y.-based business process outsourcing and technology management services provider Sutherland Global Services will formally unveil a new unit in September that will focus on work with federal and other public sector agencies.
Sutherland Government Solutions is headquartered in Reston, Va. and aims to incorporate the parent company’s practices for call center management, BPO and analytics functions at government agencies.
The parent company officially created its public sector arm in the summer and has started to participate in some customer service-oriented contracts with the departments of Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs.
Teresa Weipert, who joined the Sutherland organization in 2012 after 25 years at Accenture and Unisys, leads the government solutions entity as senior vice president and told ExecutiveBiz the unit will aim to translate Sutherland’s work for commercial businesses to civilian government agencies at the federal and state levels.
“It crosses the vertical business of Sutherland — healthcare, insurance, banking and finance, transportation, telecommunications, mortgage, and even technology areas,” she said.
“Our government focus is primarily on civilian agencies because those areas most often procure these kinds of things,” Weipert added.
Sutherland has also targeted work in the customer service arena for agencies that want to adopt practices used in the private sector to respond to public queries.
“We try to consolidate things to achieve a solid information exchange,” Weipert said.
“The whole idea is to answer questions quickly, track what is going on and produce an outcome that is a positive outcome.”
Weipert also described to ExecutiveBiz her efforts to understand the underlying foundations of technologies for large IT and BPO programs from her background at Accenture and Unisys as well as heavy accounting work in other prior career stops.
One must know how platforms connect and work as well as gain knowledge of clients’ relationships and dependencies, Weipert said.
“As we move to software-as-a-service, cloud-based type activities, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure of the service, we still need to know how it all integrates and works,” she said.
“It is important to have knowledge of the technologies that we have to use because it is changing every second and you can go crazy by reading and comparing them all.”
