A new wave of global outsourcing to India known as knowledge process offshoring, or “KPO,” is following on the heels of the remarkably successful Indian market for information technology outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO). Like ITO and BPO, KPO allows companies to realize substantial cost reductions by offshoring domestic business functions to lower cost foreign venues. KP...

Increasingly organizations are outsourcing their business processes to offshore locations. The goals cited include cost savings, achieving strategic focus, alleviating skills shortages and seeking to implement best practices. Current reports from actual outsourcing case studies indicate that many organizational goals remain unfulfilled. This paper proposes to study the impacts of BPO on the cli...

1 Based on the results of a survey of 263 BPO clients and on 57 interviews with executives leading 28 BPO relationships, we identified nine practices that contribute to best-in-class business process outsourcing (BPO) performance. The nine practices span a three-stage journey to best-in-class performance, which we call " Launch the Mission, " " Stay on Target " and " Explore New Frontiers. " Th...

Information Technology (IT) is a key productive factor in the banking and finance industry (BFI) as almost the entire production and delivery of services can in principle be digitized. Driven by cost pressure and new competitors, outsourcing IT together with the relevant business processes is a promising way to focus on core competencies and to restructure the corporate value chain. While there...

East African countries are trying to create or expand business activities by adopting outsourcing strategies. One of them is Uganda. The Ministry of ICT has given high priority to creating sound Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) policies in order to attract foreign investors. Furthermore, the faculty of Computing and Information Technology at the Makerere University in Kampala is focussing on ...

This paper introduces the theoretical foundation of an ongoing research project whose goal is to disclose how IT business alignment (ITBA) impacts business process outsourcing (BPO) success. We propose ITBA to be one of the important issues in the BPO context which can be tackled by the IS community. We regard BPO through an “innovation adoption lens” and merge findings from two different liter...

Many proposals to model service level agreements (SLAs) have been 1 elaborated in order to automate different stages of the service lifecycle such as 2 monitoring, implementation or deployment. All of them have been designed for 3 computational services and are not well–suited for other types of services such 4 as business process outsourcing (BPO) services. However, BPO services sup5 ported by...

Technology adoption theories propose that experience plays a major role in adopting or rejecting a new technology. This study analyses how the benefits of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) as a major technological innovation are perceived differently, according to the BPO adoption status of the manager responsible. A survey of Germany's 200 largest banks has been conducted (response rate: 36.8...

Organizations are pursuing the outsourcing of business processes (BPO) to offshore locations. This research applies social capital theory to study the benefits of social capital resources on knowledge sharing process capabilities in an offshore BPO relationship. The research framework is based on the resource based view of a firm where knowledge processes are the capabilities, social capital is...

Within IS outsourcing research there is an ongoing discussion whether formal contracts and relational norms function as substitutes or as complements to each other. However, even those deals which are based on relational norms usually comprise a contract as their foundation. We therefore aim at analyzing differences in contracting between both governance modes (i.e. contract-based or based on r...