Decomposition of tasks in business process outsourcing

Abstract

In industrial areas with a highly competitive environment many enterprises consider outsourcing of IT-services as an option to reduce IT-related costs. In this context, cloud computing architectures and outsourcing of business processes into the cloud are potential candidates to improve resource utilization and to reduce operative IT-costs. In this paper, we focus on a specific aspect of cloud computing and outsourcing: the use of concepts from crowd-sourcing or crowd computing in business process outsourcing (BPO). The approach used in this paper is to bring together techniques from enterprise modeling and from crowd-computing for the purpose of business process decomposition. The contributions of the paper are an analysis of requirements to process decomposition from a business process outsourcing perspective, three different strategies for performing the decomposition and an initial validation of these strategies using an industrial case.