Knowledge Process Outsourcing: Perspectives and Practices

In today’s competitive scenario, Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) has emerged as the new buzzword. The birth of globalization has paved the way for increased competition among countries. The gap between the cost of capital and productivity has made companies realize the significance of managing costs for business efficiency. This has resulted in the migration of support services from developed to developing economies in the form of "Outsourcing". As a consequence, Business Process Outsourcing has emerged as one of the major opportunities for labor abundant developing economies. BPO generally functions with pre-determined set of designs of operations for the desired solutions. The emergence of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) has transformed this, since the companies want to have tailor-made solutions for specific issues like, cycle time efficiency, market research and demand-based management. According to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), KPO industry is expected to grow at 45% in size reaching $17 billion mark by 2010. It is in this scenario of the emerging trends and boom in Knowledge Process Outsourcing, that this book provides an insight into the evolution of KPO, its role in Indian and global scenarios, the strategic shift from BPO to KPO, high-end services in KPO and also its future prospects. This book presents a series of well-written racy articles that give a bird s eye view of the scenario prevailing in KPO industry, both regionally and globally. It is hoped that this book would be of immense value to the corporates who are entering into KPO, academicians, researchers and students, as a reference book on the perspectives and challenges of Knowledge Process Outsourcing.