A Decision Method for Business Process Outsourcing Based on Enterprise Context

Business process outsourcing has regained further attention with the emergence of Cloud computing. In fact, enterprises can benefit from the cloud at the service (i.e., business), the platform and/or the infrastructure levels. Face to these various benefits, an enterprise that desires to outsource and/or deploy parts of its business process in the Cloud must resolve two decisional points: which part of its business process to outsource, which Cloud and which level of the Cloud environment are the most beneficial. The resolution of these decisional points must take into account several contextual factors that are specific to each enterprise. This paper presents the elements of enterprise context that influence the decision whether to outsource or not in a Cloud environment. In addition, it shows how AHP can be used to assist manager in taking their decision.