Blogs - Research and Analytics Services Outsourcing
| Outsourcing to optimize knowledge processes |
| By Jay Venkateswaran on 6/29/2009 3:05:20 AM |
Despite its criticality to business performance, a substantial percentage of companies do not leverage knowledge in their decision making. Why? Because truly competing with knowledge is difficult. Inadequate skill sets, an inability to scale up, organizational impediments, a lack of standardization and cultural resistance all challenge a company to become a true knowledge competitor.
Companies seeking to change the way they develop and act on insights can look to a trend that has been developing since the 1970s: outsourcing. For organizations that really want to succeed as knowledge competitors, knowledge process outsourcing, or KPO, represents an opportunity to rapidly transform their business from one driven by intuition and ad hoc knowledge gathering and analysis practices to one that is driven by insight. KPO resolves the challenges associated with becoming a knowledge competitor by:
Augmenting suboptimal corporate skill sets by expanding the capabilities of a single departmental analyst with a full range of knowledge specialists. The effects of disaggregating the single analyst's skills into a trinity of specialized skill sets - industry or domain knowledge, quantitative skills such as statistics, and data management skills - introduce the benefits of speed, reduced cost, and increased productivity.
Making knowledge processes easily scalable - easily expanded to create knowledge across a company's geographies, every day, 24/7. Because KPO providers are dedicated to the business of knowledge creation, they have the benefit of scale - size, scope and location - that most companies simply cannot replicate when they perform their processes internally.
Breaking down corporate silos and establishing best practicesby becoming the company's clearinghouse for knowledge requests; establishing broader and deeper resource pools; and delivering expertise in areas outside the company's primary domain.
Standardizing knowledge processes, enabling organizations to examine business opportunities and challenges in a consistent and systematic manner. Rather than creating an internal model to define how knowledge is used, which time-consuming and difficult, the company can turn to a provider to deliver, and standardize, knowledge spanning all business areas and geographies.
Breaking the cultural barriers that inhibit competing with knowledge - Sophisticated KPO providers implement collaboration tools as a delivery method to speed up the consumption of knowledge. So even far-flung stakeholders can see what types of business problems are being solved by their colleagues in different parts of the organization, which in and of itself spark a cultural shift to knowledge-driven decision making.
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 3 Comments so far |
Re: Outsourcing to optimize knowledge processes
A valid point there. Further, actual benefit realization based on standardized environment of complex work processes has been a key reason why companies are looking at KPO solutions. From another perspective, KPO is becoming more accessible and universal in nature due to increased synchronization of global standards, skill sets and experience for analytical functions. | | |  | | | | By Milind Pathak on 6/29/2009 12:21:50 PM |
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Re: Outsourcing to optimize knowledge processes
This is a pertinent post. A very interesting and well written article! KPO is essentially an offshoot of BPO. It is the high-end activity of the BPO industry and is estimated to have a magnificent growth in the next few years. It is estimated that the low-end work of BPOs’ will shift to destinations like Bangladesh and Philippines, while India moves over to KPO; which implies moving over from standardized routine processes and data entry kind of work in a BPO, to processes that demand advanced knowledge, analytical interpretation and technical skills. Understandably, the average KPO employee is expected to have better qualifications, skills and knowledge as compared to his/her BPO counterpart.
- Jaime | | | | | | | By Outsourcing Tech Support on 2/2/2010 2:56:30 AM |
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Re: Outsourcing to optimize knowledge processes
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. Thanks for the info. | | | | | | | By call centers philippines on 5/6/2010 2:41:41 AM |
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