经济管理学论文【荐】.pdfVIP

Offshore Business Process Outsourcing to India: Two Australian SME Case Studies Kevan Penter and Graham Pervan 1 Introduction The Australian economy currently faces labour and skill shortages and an aging work force, a legacy of ineffective education and training practices plus a strong economy. As a result, Australian medium and large firms require a global sourcing strategy in order to continue to grow and create value for shareholders. A signifi- cant source of expert labour is India and offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) by Australian firms to India increasingly requires systematic analysis by Australian managers (Barrett, 2007). In this paper we present a brief history of BPO in India and discuss two case studies of small to medium sized Australian organiza- tions which have chosen to offshore significant parts of their operation to Bangalore, India. The research results may be of interest to Australian managers, government policy makers, academics in business and information systems management and their counterparts in India. 2 Business Process Outsourcing BPO is defined as handing over to a third party responsibility for performing certain business processes that are required for an organization to carry out its mission. In defining BPO, some researchers view IT outsourcing (ITO) as a subset (Willcocks, Lacity, Cullen, 2006; Robinson Kalakota, 2004), so for the purposes of this research, BPO is defined as the outsourcing of any knowledge-intensive business process, including ITO. BPO can apply to various ‘back office’ functions, which can include human resources, finance and accounting, processing of insurance and credit transactions, procurement, and IT services (Grant, 2005; Davies 2004; Feeny, Lacity, Willcocks, 2003, 2005). Common to many of these back office processes is that they are IT-intensive. In the past fifteen years, academic research on ITO has expanded sig