The Outsourcing Knowledge Group Steering Committee

The role of the Steering Committee is to drive thought leadership and best practice within the Outsourcing knowledge area and ensure members of this group are exposed to the most up to date information, insight and trends.

Steering Committee Members:

• Are you interested in becoming a member of this steering committee? Call Kevin Monahan on +44 (0) 20 7819 6261

David Downs
David Downs is a principal consultant at EquaTerra (formerly Morgan Chambers). 

David joined the company in February 2000 and since that time he has worked across Europe providing advice to organisations throughout the complete Sourcing lifecycle. He is an expert in implementing and securing benefit form outsourcing relationships with particular focus on supporting organisations in building robust contractual relationships aligned to business objectives and is the head of the European Leaders in Procurement Outsourcing knowledge group.

During his seven years at EquaTerra, David has advised and supported clients across Europe and in a wide variety of business sectors. For example, in the past two years David has recently completed a significant outsource of both IT and Business Process functions across the Nordic region, developed a sourcing strategy for a utility organisation in Belgium, and implemented a 'get well programme' for a UK based outsourced relationship. In all these assignments, he has worked alongside, and in collaboration with, the client's Procurement function.

Prior to joining the organisation, David enjoyed a long career in IT, during which he has built extensive background experience across strategy, development and service delivery; specific relevance to the core Sourcing expertise of EquaTerra:

• IT Strategy Manager at Pearl Assurance plc - a role encompassed establishing strategies for the Sourcing of IT development projects through third party suppliers (including offshore)
• IT Resource Manager / Head of Development at Thomas Cook Group - taking full responsibility for re-engineering the IT development function to provide an integrated corporate wide service leveraging in-house and external resource as appropriate
• Head of Service Delivery at Thomas Cook Group - responsible for all aspects of IT support and service across the UK, including the management of significant IT outsourced contracts and relationships

Dirk Karl
Dirk Karl is General Manager and Chief Procurement Officer at ING. He heads the Global Vendor Management department and is responsible for all IT-related vendor management activities at group level. In this capacity he leads strategic relationships with global vendors with the objective of leveraging group spend and developing the vendors' potential value delivery to the ING business in the areas of IT hardware, software, networks and professional services. He has developed the Global Vendor Management (GVM) strategy for ING and is currently implementing a centralized process for software purchases from select global suppliers.

Dirk joined ING in 2005 and came to the company with extensive experience in Banking and IT. He has taken the lead on several complex vendor management initiatives within a global IT outsourcing environment. His career spans positions at General Motors and Daimler Chrysler where he was, respectively, Chief Information Officer for European and Latin American Operations and Sector Manager in Financial Services. Dirk was Managing Director at ING for Operations &IT Banking before taking on the global role as Chief Procurement Officer for ING Group.

A German national, Dirk holds a Masters degree in Business Administration & Economics.

Martin Laurent
Martin Laurent is Purchase Manager at Atlas Copco ASAP a shared service organisation of the Atlas Copco Group, a Global leader in industrial productivity solutions (www.atlascopco.com).

Martin joined Atlas Copco in February 2002 as Group Leading Buyer. Within this position he was responsible for Corporate IT sourcing, contract and vendor management. During his five years in that function Martin was involved in most of Atlas Copco's major outsourcing deals from infrastructure or data communication to BPO. Martin's new mission since June 2007 is to set up a non-core purchasing service organisation to provide sourcing, procurement and vendor management services to other entities of the Atlas Copco Group.

Prior to joining Atlas Copco, Martin enjoyed a career in the IT hardware industry in several Purchasing roles where he gained extensive background experience in Sourcing, Supplier Relationship Management and Supply Management from international markets such as Taiwan, China and the USA.