Over the past 20 years, customers and available service providers have gathered extensive experience in outsourcing. The arrival of suppliers specializing in outsourcing saw the creation of a complex service industry with increasing maturity and a value-added chain with ever increasing differentiation. With first-generation outsourcing, the focus was on IT systems. The primary goal was to reduce costs. A restriction to cost reductions alone, however, is not sufficient to fully exploit the optimization potential.

The know-how of external service providers can considerably improve a company’s own business processes and the quality of its products and services. Clients who merely offer historically established infrastructures or business processes to outsourcing service providers are missing out on opportunities. These days, business and IT processes must be closely linked and able to provide a direct image of the dynamic changes in business life. Before individual business and IT processes can be outsourced to professional service providers, they generally have to be subjected to re-engineering. As a result, traditional outsourcing is turned into business-transformation outsourcing or next-generation outsourcing. New business models are increasingly arising for service providers in projects which involve next-generation outsourcing.

These provide for performance agreements founded in the major changes in the client’s business environment and they are principally aligned with the business objectives or the operation of business processes which may result from previous transformations. The integration and operation of business and IT processes, as well as the development of business partnerships in next-generation outsourcing, are based on the assumption of highly varied capabilities among service providers. The essential point is to simulate and monitor integral business processes in real time.

The customer expects a higher degree of flexibility than was available in the past, as well as an increase in the overall availability of business processes. Successful next-outsourcing generation projects already exist, but there is still a great need for information. elite Software Products Consortium and Partners are organizing the “4th Ukrainian Outsourcing Forum 2007” (November 1-2, 2007, Kiev) for companies which would like to meet, discuss concepts and share experience. We look forward to seeing you there!