Developing a decision model for business process outsourcing

Information technology (IT) outsourcing has been one of the critical issues in organization management. Business process outsourcing (BPO) is an advanced type of IT outsourcing, which will be the next big wave in information technology services. Nevertheless, since prior studies have only examined issues related to traditional IS outsourcing, there have been few researches that introduce and discuss the important factors that should be considered in the decision of BPO adoption. This paper identifies factors affecting the BPO decision and structures a decision model using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. By proposing a quantitative decision model, this paper will not only assist management in making better decisions in outsourcing their business processes, but also help them to obtain the most benefits from BPO. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.