BPO (Business Process Outsource)

Business Process Outsource

The continued growth of the Business Process Outsource market and some of the areas where BPOs and solution providers may look to innovate.

There are two further significant issues that I believe will become increasingly important.

Shortening the time to ROI is a key focus of BPO customers, but a related issue that still needs to be resolved is: what will be the ‘best practice’ for achieving not just short term ROI, but also the best long-term approach?

There are many approaches out there, and the debate between BPA (Business Process Automation) versus BPM (Business Process Management) and Business Process Outsource is central to this. How should these approaches best be intertwined? Are customers prepared to outsource whole processes or is “by-pass” process outsourcing solution the way forward? How do you define the differences between them or do you use other terms, too? I think these will be big questions in the BPO market in the next few years. Ideally they will be solved through closer relationships between BPO providers and their customers.

On the BPA v BPM v BPO discussion, we have added a post here defining these terms as we see them.

Finally, I strongly believe that the need for distributed processing is increasing, and will become an important factor for BPOs. This of course means reducing the cost of logistics; for example, moving paper by courier needs to be removed and of course the time it takes to move it. This also means for me including the end customer in the process for tasks such as exception handling, in an audited way without system-breaks. Distributed processing can have some significant benefits in terms of ROI and time-to-market discussions.

This will potentially have a huge impact on BPO providers, as they will need to consider all of the keys to successfully and efficiently processing in a distributed environment. Data protection issues when operating in the cloud, minimizing logistics costs, maximizing linguistic skills, unique local regulations, and the need to include end customers are just some factors that come to mind.

So, while we can expect growth and expansion in the BPO market in coming years, constant change and improvement is a theme I expect to continue and eventually drive further growth.

What other things do you expect will happen in the Business Process Outsource market in the next few years? Do you agree with my thoughts? I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas … so please feel free to comment below.