Based on cost savings and efficiency gains in past business process outsourcing (BPO) projects, firms increasingly consider outsourcing knowledge-intensive and strategically oriented business processes. However, the success of these strategic BPO projects entails strong commitment from both the client and the service provider to leverage interfirm resources and engage in close collaboration to ...

Business process outsourcing (BPO) has been suggested as one of the biggest areas of growth in the outsourcing market. Nevertheless, many organizations are still reluctant to outsource business processes that are part of their core business. In order to help overcome this divergence between expectations and reality, we systematically analyze the factors that form an organization’s attitude towa...

Does BPO pay off at the firm-level? Although there are several studies which analyze the potential benefits of BPO, there is a virtual absence of research papers on BPO outcomes. Based on an analysis of 137 Business process outsourcing (BPO) ventures at 254 German banks in a period between 1994 and 2005, we found that the outsourcer’s financial performance in terms of profitability and cost eff...

Some Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) vendors are providing Information Technology (IT) Enabled Process Outsourcing and Reengineering service to clients. The benefits of the IT Enabled Process Outsourcing and Reengineering approach include long term productivity, service and quality improvements, decrease in costs, and gain sharing in addition to the benefits of the Fee-For-Service Outsourcin...

This study integrates perspectives from neo-institutional economics, organization theory and information systems to examine why firms choose different governance structures across business process outsourcing (BPO) relationships. In particular, we focus on the information processing (IP) requirements that must be managed during the course of the BPO relationship and antecedent uncertainty in th...

Outsourcing decisions are not, technically, irreversible. But in practical terms the organizational disruption and financial costs of bringing services back in house (“backsourcing”) mean that few organizations revert, even when quite dissatisfied with an arrangement. Instead, organizations typically seek to move to another outsourcing arrangement, that is sometimes less attractive than the ori...

Purpose – The motivation for this research is to contribute towards development of a management framework for offshore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Design/methodology/approach This paper utilises longitudinal case studies to identify success factors in managing offshore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) via the captive model (i.e. wholly-owned subsidiary). Findings – Success in offshore...

A marked development in the last decade has been the growth of “virtual organizations” (or “extended enterprises”), where a network of service supplier and vendor firms cooperates to create customer value. One form of cooperation is described as business process outsourcing (BPO). A business process involves several interrelated activities performed with the goal of generating customer value. B...

While the issue of risk in information technology outsourcing (ITO) is addressed by numerous authors, the risks of business process outsourcing (BPO) are essentially unexplored. The authors propose that the risk structure of ITO is different compared to the one in BPO, the latter therefore requiring additional research. To challenge this proposition the major risks of ITO have been derived from...