Business Platforms – BPO meets Technology: Avoid Business and IT 'silos' while outsourcing your processes

BPO is often viewed purely as a business driven initiative with more focus on cost arbitrage, staff augmentation and sourcing of skills. However if you are embarking BPO without understanding the debilitate affect of IT on outsourced business process effort, in all probability you would be missing the sustainable savings which your service provider can render you over a period of time. It is important to devise IT strategy keeping outsourcing enablement in mind so that the outsourced processes within embedded technology would be agile enough to respond to any external and internal business environmental changes.

Some of the paramount reasons that why IT and business process owners are disjointed and are not aligned at the time of outsourcing are:
-          Business outsourcing decisions are typically taken by business units which are decentralized and IT is normally owned by corporate
-          Outsourcing normally focused on cost reduction and process performance with - IT as a constant in the cost equation - thereby missing opportunity on automation and process redefinition
-          Typically BPO service provider puts more effort on standardization from outsourcing perspective and system takes the lowest priority.

It is necessary to involve IT at the time of BPO planning and execution and similarly IT also must take the initiative to show that it has the ability to translate the IT dimensions of the BPO solution into measurable attributes that business can assess as part of evaluation process.

Most of the IT organization never kept ‘offshore enablement’ in mind while devising its technology landscape resulting in suboptimal efficiency even in the beginning of outsourcing which is extremely difficult to be realized later due to creation of silos – ‘technology owned by organization while processes outsourced to the service provider’. Some of the ‘missed opportunities’ due to fragmented IT landscape while clearly evident after outsourcing are difficult to be addressed due to this silo and this actually reminds me of a decade old dilemma organizations faced – should you reengineer before ERP implementation or vice versa? In some way this dilemma is haunting organizations today also and the emerging managed services or platform service model clearly addresses this aspect to a great extent wherein service provider will take the end-to-end responsibility of both process and technology thereby effectively address any ‘change’ with agility.