An FCM Approach for Agility-Based Risk Assessment in Business Process Outsourcing

Business process outsourcing is an improved version of information technologies outsourcing, which is considered to be a new big current in information systems services. This work proposes a fuzzy cognitive map methodology (FCM) for evaluating risk criteria in business process outsourcing. FCM, which represents experts’ knowledge and human experience, is to assess risk factors of business process outsourcing by introducing concepts to define criteria and causality links among the concepts for modelling a system’s behaviour. Since there are causal links between criteria, and the problem can be represented by a network, FCM method is thought to be suitable to evaluate the risk factors of business process outsourcing. The case study is conducted in a bank that performs in Turkish banking sector. Agility is the most important risk criteria of business process outsourcing, followed by coordination and reliability according to FCM results