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The impact of process standardization on business process outsourcing success

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Abstract

What is the impact of business process standardization on business process outsourcing (BPO) success? This paper argues that there is a direct impact of process standardization on BPO success, due to production cost economies, and also an indirect effect via improved contractual and relational governance resulting from better monitoring opportunities and facilitated communication and coordination. This threefold impact of standardization on BPO success is empirically confirmed using data from 335 BPO ventures in 215 German banks.

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Acknowledgements

We are greatly indebted to Jens Dibbern for his thoughtful comments and suggestions that helped us to substantially improve this paper. Also, we would like to thank Rudy Hirschheim, Armin Heinzl, and the participants of the ICOIS 2007 conference for their valuable support. We are also grateful for the financial support of the E-Finance Lab.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems, E-Finance Lab, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Mertonstrayße 17, 60054, Frankfurt, Germany

    Kim Wüllenweber & Wolfgang König

  2. Chair of Information Systems and Services, University of Bamberg, Feldkirchenstr. 21, 96045, Bamberg, Germany

    Daniel Beimborn & Tim Weitzel

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  1. Kim Wüllenweber
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  2. Daniel Beimborn
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  3. Tim Weitzel
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  4. Wolfgang König
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Correspondence to Kim Wüllenweber.

Additional information

An earlier version of this paper (“Business Process Outsourcing: The Challenge of Process Standardization”) was presented at the Intl. Conference on Outsourcing of Information Systems (ICOIS) in Heidelberg in 2007.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 2 Used indicators
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Table 3 Indicator and construct reliability of reflectively measured constructs
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Table 4 Indicator and construct reliability of formatively measured construct
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Table 5 Inter-construct correlations (diagonal shows square root of AVE)
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Table 6 Cross-loadings of reflectively measured construct
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Table 7 Common method bias assessment
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Wüllenweber, K., Beimborn, D., Weitzel, T. et al. The impact of process standardization on business process outsourcing success. Inf Syst Front 10, 211–224 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-008-9063-x

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