Guest Speaker:
Ravi ARON
Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Date & Venue:
Date: 26 July 2004, Monday
Time: 4.00pm-5.00pm
Venue: Eu Tong Sen, Level 1, Seminar Room 1,
Singapore Management University
469 Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259756
(Location Map)
Topic:
Off-Shoring Of Services And Business Processes: Emerging Governance Structures & IT-Enabled Instruments Of Governance – Empirical Evidence From Field Research
About the Seminar:
Advances made in information technology and Telecommunications in the recent years have enabled firms to create real-time linkages between their information systems and share large data sets relatively costlessly. This trend has given rise to the phenomenon of firms outsourcing their entire back-offices to off-shore (and onshore) third party service providers who execute these processes for them. Consulting firm Gartner estimates that cross-border Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) will grow into a $178.5 billion business by 2005 from $123.6 billion in 2001. Other estimates suggest that the off-shore BPO industry will grow to over 230 billion in 2015. The practice has gained considerable attention from the business media and from policy makers. A raft of legislations have been proposed to curtail the extent of outsourcing of processes to overseas labor markets. The practise of outsourcing of services has gone beyond call centers to such expertise-intensive functions such as Radiology, Equity Research, Cash Flow Forecasting, Supply Chain Coordination and Tax Accounting.
This phenomenon poses a number of questions of considerable research significance to researchers in such diverse disciplines as economics, organizational theory, information systems, operations management and trade theory. We have been studying the globalization of services for over four years now and have investigated several issues in this domain. We have collected data from several countries – both from corporations that outsource services and those that provide off-shore, service execution capacity. Out survey spans companies from the US, UK, Singapore, India and Mauritius and addresses a number of issues. We highlight some of these issues:
1. What new organizational forms and governance structures have been made possible by recent advances in telecommunications, information technology and the liberalization of regulatory regimes (especially, in low-wage regimes such as India and China).
2. What Organizational and governance forms are particularly suited for the outsourcing (or off-shoring) of services and why? How does process complexity influence the nature of the optimal governance structure?
3. What is the impact of off-shoring of processes on productivity? Do off-shore providers offer a higher level of productivity? Is the productivity of off-shore firms related to the nature of the processes?
4. What are the different kinds of risk associated with off-shore outsourcing and how are these manifest in different types of contracts?
We will provide insights into these questions based on our survey of Business Process Outsourcing.
Registration:
This seminar is free. Please register early. (Admission on a first-come-first-served basis.)
For registration, please click here (Registration closes on 23 July 2004, Friday)
Enquiries:
Ms. Lim Lih Yeng
Email: lylim@smu.edu.sg, Tel: 6822-0197
Ms. Priscilla Cheng
Email: priscillacheng@smu.edu.sg, Tel: 6822-0383
