The Corporate Librarian

KPO, for those of you who haven’t heard of it before, stands for Knowledge Process Outsourcing. It’s a subclass of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) which deals with processes relating to knowledge-intensive industries (such as database development, design work, investment banking research, legal research, managing clinical trials, etc.).

I briefly referred to it before in a post on outsourcing - Wikipedia’s added a lot more sources and fleshed out the article on it since.

TPI, a firm which provides advisory services around sourcing, has published a report last month looking at the market that does a nice job of deflating some of the hype. Note that they don’t cover a number of services which are either embryonic markets or which will be addressed in future studies: design and animation services, engineering services legal process outsourcing, publishing outsourcing and tele-radiology (digital transmission of images for radiologists offshore to review).

Will there be challenges to white-collar occupations, including some research positions, from KPO? Sure - the fact I’m looking for a job now points to that. But TPI’s done a nice job of addressing the complexity of providing those services, so that people can have a better idea of how to react.

When looking for a topic to post on, it never hurts to check out other blogs. And thus I discovered the brouhaha resulting from Steven Cohen’s post on his new job.

We work with outside research providers on occasion, but the relationship is very carefully managed and the value that our research group provides as opposed to external service providers is always communicated. As I’ve noted, we’re constantly working to market ourselves.
Nevertheless, there is always pressure to deliver services more cheaply, so we have been building up staff in lower-cost locations. Even here though, American and European researchers have advanced presentation skills, deep client relationships and a wealth of industry expertise, so it’s more of a partnership then a case of “Oh my God, those [insert nationality] are taking away chargeable* work from me!” Although I won’t deny that some of us had that very fear initially.

Do any of you have experience with outsourcing of library services, and what has the impact been (I refuse to use “impact” as a verb)?

* We have recoverability targets for our time, with the exact percentage varying based on level. Not meeting recoverability targets is grounds for a downgrade come performance review time.

Bonus link: Wikipedia’s poorly-cited article on Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), which I should edit one of these days. The “$17 billion by 2010″ comes from Evalueserve’s 2004 study “The Next Big Opportunity – Moving up the Value Chain – From BPO to KPO” (the “recent study” mentioned in the article). That report which “predicts that India will capture more than 70 percent of the KPO sector by 2010″? Evalueserve again, though I haven’t found the primary source yet.