Decision Making Model for Business Process Outsourcing of Enterprise Content Management

Business process outsourcing (BPO) in enterprise content management (ECM) is a growing though immature market. BPO in ECM focuses on pursuing market transactions in the process of managing all types of content being used in organizations. However, inadequate sourcing decisions lead to organizational sensitive content exposure, high transaction cost, poor outsourcer performance, low flexibility. ECM BPO in general is rarely discussed in the literature and no discussion was found on decision making strategies in ECM BPO. In this paper, we present a decision making model for ECM BPO that will fill the literature gap and guide industry practitioners with ECM sourcing decision making strategies. Our proposed decision making model includes two parts. Part one is an ECM functional framework that shows what functionality component or functionality combinations can be outsourced. Part two is a decision making model that provides guidance for decision making in ECM BPO. We apply the model in two case studies, and the results indicate that the model can guide the sourcing decision making process for organizations, and determine the factors when considering sourcing alternatives in ECM.