Business Architecture: The Basis for a Design-Oriented Approach to Business Process Outsourcing

This paper presents an approach to business process outsourcing (BPO) based on the development of a business architecture. The paper argues that business architecture can form the basis for the effective planning, design and negotiation of a BPO initiative. The approach comprises the following steps: business problem analysis; determination of the required performance standards; in-house versus market capability assessment; business service provider engagement; joint service architecture design; and service contract negotiation. A key feature of the approach is that the client organisation and the outsourcing business service provider jointly develop the business architecture. The authors make the claim that such an approach to BPO incorporates a design attitude, rather than the decision attitude that is common to other BPO methods and approaches.