Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) is a form of outsourcing, in which knowledge-related and information-related work is carried out by workers in a different company or by a subsidiary of the same organization, which may be in the same country or in an offshore location to save cost. Unlike the outsourcing of manufacturing, this typically involves high-value work carried out by highly skilled staff. KPO firms, in addition to providing expertise in the processes themselves, often make many low level business decisions—typically those that are easily undone if they conflict with higher-level business plans.
KPO is merely a continuation of BPO, though with rather more business complexity. The defining difference is that KPO is usually focused on knowledge-intensive business processes that require significant domain expertise (application professionalism in the language of Chapter 1). The offshore team servicing a KPO contract cannot be easily hired overnight as they will be highly educated and trained, and trusted to take decisions on behalf of the client.
IT outsourcing is strongly focused around technical professionalism, and the migration to business process outsourcing introduces this extra dimension of application professionalism. Ever more complex services, as implied by KPO, demonstrate this very well. The profile of people being hired to serve within KPO service companies are more diverse than just being drawn from technical IT services – these are people with MBAs, and medical, engineering, design or other specialist business skills. KPO delivers higher value to organizations that offshore their domain-based processes, thereby enhancing the traditional cost– quality paradigm of BPO. The central theme of KPO is to create value for the client by providing business expertise rather than process expertise. So KPO involves a shift from standardized processes to advanced analytical thinking, technical skills and decisive judgement based on experience."
Types of KPO services
KPO services include the following:
§ Investment research services (equity, fixed income and credit, and quantitative research)
§ Business research services
§ Data Analytics
§ Market research services
§ Valuation and Fairness Opinions
§ Patent research services
Market researching
Leaders in the market research industry are slowly seeing the benefits offered by KPO and have begun outsourcing.[ Comprehensive IT solutions are offered by vendors who provide solutions covering the entire life cycle of a market research project. Smaller firms can also benefit from these solutions as they are cost effective and remain within the budget of smaller organizations.
KPO is claimed to efficiently increase productivity and increase cost savings in the area of market research. Advocates claim that the trend is likely to prove increasingly popular in the global market research industry.
No comments:
Post a Comment