Business Process Outsourcing (glossary)
The transfer of internal business processes, such as customer relationship management, finance & accounting, human resources and procurement, to an external service provider. (Gewald and Rouse 2012)
Source(s)
Gewald, H. and A. Rouse. 2012. "Comparing Business Process and IT Outsourcing Risks--An Exploratory Study in Germany and Australasia," 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS), 4-7 Jan. 2012, 275-284. Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6148641&isnumber=6148595.
Discussion
The term business process outsourcing is often confounded with "information technology (IT) outsourcing", they are related but not synonymous. IT oriented companies and consultancies often do so. Gartner's definition is a good example: "the delegation of one or more IT-intensive business processes to an external provider that, in turn, owns, administrates and manages the selected processes based on defined and measurable performance metrics."[1]. Any business process may be outsourced.