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Governments and NGO's worldwide are working in earnest to develop tools and programs to help less developed countries bridge the digital and information divide. These strategies have been successful in many countries by providing employment, creating service exports and contributing positively to the overall standard of living. One such strategy is the development of business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
BPO can be defined as, "the performance of any aspect of an entity's business processes by an external contractor."

The complexity of today's organizational operations, requiring costly re-investment in technology and training, has forced key executives to introspect if they are concentrating on right things, for right reasons, and in right way. There are some natural questions: -

Why spend time & resources perfecting a support function when it can be performed better, faster, and less expensively by an outside provider?

Why not divert valuable resources to functions that provide a competitive edge?

No organization, no matter how strong, can be effective at everything. There just isn't enough money, time or energy to achieve excellence in every aspect of operations. Successful organizations focus on Core Business, what differentiates them from others; while finding alternative ways to handle Non-Core functions. Globalization has forced adoption of cost reductions methods to survive in competitive business world. And this has given birth to a new industry - Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

BPO is the act of transferring some of an organization's repeated non-core and core business processes to an outside provider to achieve cost reductions while improving service quality. Because the processes are repeated and a long-term contract is used, outsourcing goes far beyond the use of consultants. If done well, BPO results in increasing shareholder value. The main difference between BPO and more traditional IT outsourcing is that BPO offers companies a way of achieving transformational outcomes much more quickly.

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* Contributed by: -
Priyanka Ghosh & Alvika Derhgawen,
PGDIM, IM-11,
NITIE, Mumbai.