Including Business Process Outsourcing Services

Including Business Process Outsourcing Services into an existing enterprise requires a trade off between agility and investment. Companies need to first discover what their own strengths are before they lean on the strengths of others. Outsourcing allows the enterprise to focus on its core strengths. Deals that dilute that focus are a lose-lose all around.

What is the corporation's critical infrastructure? For a modern knowledge based enterprise in the "global west", office space should never be a bottleneck. Additional space can always be leased on a short or long term basis quite easily and at quite reasonable rates. The same goes for furniture and office equipment and given that the current depreciation rules have a hard time keeping up with the ever increasing power to price ratio of computer servers, software as a service or cloud computing is very attractive. The three critical legs that support the enterprise are reputation, business processes (including enterprise specific software) and key personnel. Including Business Process Outsourcing Services can either hurt or enhance any one of these three legs. And if even one of these legs breaks then the entire enterprise will come crashing down.

A company's reputation is put in play every time it depends on another entity. Take for example how Dell Computer's reputation for customer support took a big hit when it simply dumped the process overseas with little oversight. On the other hand being able to contract out processes quickly can give a company a well-earned reputation for agility and as a result the company's clients will begin to value their connections with it because it will have become a real lifesaver.

Every enterprise has business processes. These can be very ad-hoc or highly structured. Contracting out work processes can easily cause massive rework as one tiny detail was out of place, one little question wasn't asked of the customers, or some of the agents did things one way while others did things differently. In any case this can call for massive amounts of rework that might only be noticed months after the fact. But if the processes are handed off well then the employees of the enterprise can jump forwards and get back to work on those things they do that produce the most value.

And it is with the key personnel where including Business Process Outsourcing Services must be an investment, not a replacement. If a process is fully automatic then get a computer, not a person. But there are a lot of things that require low to medium skills that take up a lot of time. If these tasks take up half the time of a highly skilled and well paid knowledge worker and all of these are outsourced then that worker has just doubled in productivity for less than twice the price. Given how hard it is to find the most productive employees the return on investment can be almost instant and long lasting. However if the employees see themselves as being replaced rather than enhanced they can drag down the entire enterprise.

So given the risks to reputation, business processes and key personnel, including Business Process Outsourcing Services needs to be done carefully and with all eyes on the prize.

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