Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts in which my colleague Bianca den Elsen and I will be looking at the current state of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and how organizations achieve high performance in BPO.

As Accenture’s Executive Director Business Process Outsourcing in the Netherlands, I am leading a team of outsourcing professionals in a mission of growth and entrepreneurship. Bianca is a senior executive at Accenture’s Business Process Outsourcing practice. She has led multiple global mobilization programs, transitioning clients’ business processes to Accenture’s near- and off-shore delivery centers. She is currently the Business Process Outsourcing Lead for the Communications, Media & Technology practice in the Benelux and France.

Over the years Business Process Outsourcing has proven itself as a valuable strategy for organizations seeking new ways to achieve high performance while controlling costs, reducing risk, fostering collaboration and increasing transparency. Now beginning its third decade of existence, business process outsourcing has become an accepted management practice across most companies and industries. At the same time, it is becoming a more complex endeavor, going deeper into the value chains of companies. That means that the bar is being raised in terms of what companies are expecting from their BPO providers.

We are on the verge of an era in which BPO is moving to a “cost-plus” value proposition and will increasingly be part of the global operating model of large companies. But what is the business impact and value of this new proposition? In an effort to define this greater value and understand how it can be achieved, we will kick-off this series of blog posts with discussing the key insights of Accenture’s research on the status of BPO in the Netherlands. Questions debated are “How mature and well established is BPO in business?” and “What are the main reasons to practice BPO?”. And (perhaps) even more importantly: “What BPO can do for client organizations now and tomorrow.”