Business Process Outsourcing: The Promise of the Enterprise Partnership Model

In this chapter we report our research into Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Using case studies, we assess initial progress and challenges to 2005, then update developments to 2008. As is reflected in these cases, by 2001 the outsourcing of so-called IT-enabled back office support processes was beginning to be seen as a viable strategy by many large corporations, fuelling forecast revenue growth of 10%-15% per annum in a market already estimated then as worth nearly a quarter of that of IT outsourcing (Lacity and Willcocks, 2001). Figures for BPO are, for many reasons, notoriously difficult to arrive at accurately, but in a review of several studies Willcocks and Lacity (2006) suggested that in 2006 the market could have been as big as $US80 billion and would grow at a forecast 10–12% over the next five years.1