Business process outsourcing to the Cloud: What activity to outsource?

Abstract

Face to the increasingly stringent business competition, Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) strive to excel in the marketplace by adopting different strategies and solutions. Outsourcing their business processes to the Cloud is considered as a widely adopted strategy. Among others, SMEs outsource their related business process to improve their performance. However, this strategy is not without inconvenience especially when the decision is taken without being aware of the business process requirements and the experts preferences. This paper's major contributions are: the proposition of a monitoring tool to identify the defaulting activities causing the degradation of the business process performance. These information are used later to favor the outsourcing of defaulting activities as the Cloud environment may be a better alternative environment instead of the enterprise one as it can provide a better IT infrastructure with lower cost compared to the in-house one. Furthermore, we propose a decision model using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to assist experts in the fastidious task of selecting suitable activity to be outsourced according to the identified requirements and the experts preferences. It resorts essentially to commonly used standards which make it a powerful tool for both IT and business experts. An evaluation of the results is elaborated to insure the utility of the elaborated tool using the CloudSim toolkit.