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Do you know your business processes well enough to outsource them?
Posted on March 20th, 2009 10 commentsIf you read the Daily Telegraph you might have come across the Media Planet supplement “Sourcing” last Tuesday (March 17th); it had the strap line “Utilising sourcing as part of your business strategy”.
Of course we are all pretty familiar with the now standard model of outsourcing, or off-shoring software development. There are numerous destinations for this, Eastern Europe and India being most common, butalso far eastern countries like China and the Philippines.
Also, we are pretty familiar with outsourcing departments, like Customer Services and Back Office.
But what about outsourcing Business Processes ?
Well I suppose it’s a pretty natural progression – as we have pushed IT Systems up the abstraction hierarchy, from systems development and service oriented architecture towards business process orchestration, it then seems natural at the business level to consider outsourcing the business processes themselves.
But, how well do we understand our business processes? Well enough to be able to express to an outsourcing company what you want them to do for you? Techniques like BPMN look to me to be a natural fit for this – a rich enough notation so you can express your overall business processes and then consider for portions of your business whether they need to be local or can be offshore.
And then, the strap line – “Utilising sourcing as part of your business strategy” – in BMM (Business Motivation Modeling) terms, this is a Means to achieving your business Ends. I think it would be really valuable for anyone considering ‘Sourcing’ to model their business strategy using BMM and then look to use BPMN to model their business processes. Having a well defined strategy and business process model will help guarantee successful outsourcing.
10 responses to “Do you know your business processes well enough to outsource them?”
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Modeling with BMM is very valuable technique to discover the business context and identifying processes. In our projects, customers using BMM are amazed, that processes on a more strategic level are forgotten if plain business process analysis with BPMN or UML notagtions have been done.
Lets take an exmaple by looking in the trading business of international holdings having companies across the world
Of course BPMN supports modeling analysing sales and purchasing processes of any of the companies process. But what about the processes that help the holding organisation to find out what company within the holding performs best ??
Modeling strategies like “align international pricing” or “tracking company performance figures” can be easily done by using BMM . After identifying and describing strategies, detailed process analysis can be done with BPMN.
So Business Experts will benefit from BMM because the techniques support focussing on the most promising process improvement. This is they way to get to hanging fruits in optimising your organisation performance !
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Good, interesting article, but where took information?
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The Daily Telegraph supplement “Sourcing” has now been made available by the National Outsourcing Association on their website at http://www.noa.co.uk/UserFiles/additions/SourcingMarch2009.pdf
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Philippines Outsourcing July 4th, 2009 at 02:45
I would prefer a staff leasing company where you can hire a staff or two to do the job, instead of hiring a whole company to do it. And when you’re looking to hire freelancers, staff leasing companies also provides low-cost staff that are well monitored making sure that the staff you hire completes the job you requested.
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I can see where Phillippines Outsourcing is coming from (and the motivation for the comment), but I think the point in Callum’s post is a wider one.
Appreciating that the outsourcing of development of systems is now accepted, I believe he was trying to point out the difference between that activity, and the outsourcing of specific business processes. In particular highlighting how the lessons we’ve learnt from software development outsourcing, in terms of requirements specification (using UML, Word docs or whatever), need to be applied to BP outsourcing too.
The use of business modeling like the BMM (business motivation model) and BPMN (business process modeling notation) standards will help these companies to better define the required processes to their outsourcing partners.
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Virtual Web Outsourcing July 22nd, 2009 at 12:34
The problem with free lancers is you don’t have enough hold on them in case they want to quit the job. In other respect, it is also advantageous because you don’t need to sign for a year contract.
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I’m not quite sure how the previous comment relates to Callum’s blog entry, but it does raise another important reason for documenting your business strategies and processes in some standardized way.
I believe it’s being referred to elsewhere as corporate memory. In essence, if your key staff were to leave, would their knowledge of what the business does, and why and how it does it be retained in a useful medium?
I’m sure that in these somewhat unsure times, more companies should be looking to capture that knowledge, and standards such as the business motivation model and business process modeling notation, often coupled with some support from tools such as Select Architect, are key to that discovery and capture process.
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Nice post. I like the way you look at things. I just found this site using Google and I’ll try to watch for other things you write too.
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The thing is that you need to study and understand your business processes first before deciding to outsource it.
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[...] year or so ago, Callum Potter blogged about an article regarding the outsourcing of business processes, and the role that Business Motivation Modeling (BMM) techniques and Business Process Modeling [...]
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