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Cybersecurity and access to critical talent are the top worries on CPOs’ minds, according to a Hackett Group report, The CPO Agenda: Expanding Procurement’s Influence Through Change and Innovation. The importance of cybersecurity is compounded by the EU’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect May 25. In addition, cybersecurity and access to critical talent are also expected to be “high risk” in the near future by three quarters of procurement professionals who took part in The Hackett Group’s annual Key Issues Study.

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The MSP industry was born in the early 1990s. Enterprises were using more and more temporary labor, sourced without much control of cost and risk from a fragmented and opaque staffing industry. The very idea of an enterprise contingent workforce management program was a glimmer in the eye of CFOs. However, what had been a small problem was becoming a big one. To help businesses take control of their growing temporary labor use, MSPs, along with VMS technologies, stepped up to offer a solution to this problem. And since the 1990s, MSPs have served enterprises in these ways, delivering value primarily in the form of spend visibility, cost avoidance and reduction, and compliance enforcement. But what worked in the past in no longer simply enough for many businesses to justify their ongoing with relationships with MSPs.