Title: A decision-making method for business process outsourcing to the cloud based on business motivation model and AHP

Authors: Mouna Rekik; Khouloud Boukadi; Hanêne Ben-Abdallah

Addresses: Sfax University, P.O. Box 3021, SakietEzzit, Technology Center of Sfax, Tunisia ' Sfax University, P.O. Box 3021, SakietEzzit, Technology Center of Sfax, Tunisia ' King Abdulaziz University, P.O. Box 80200, Jeddah 21589, KSA

Abstract: Outsourcing business processes to the cloud is among the proposed solutions to help SME to emerge in the market and enhance their added value. However, the benefits of such solution highly depend on several factors specific to the enterprise context. Hence, an enterprise needs a decision-making method to assist it in deciding whether its business plan calls for cloud computing adoption, which parts of its business process are the most profitable from outsourcing, which cloud computing model is the most suitable, ... This paper highlights the need and proposes a context-aware decision method for cloud adoption to enable enterprises to understand, self-assess, and select an appropriate cloud computing model aligned to their business context. Besides proposing an appropriate enterprise context, this paper shows how the business motivation model of an enterprise also enhances the outsourcing decision-making by taking into account the business plan and vision of the enterprise.

Keywords: business process outsourcing; BPO; cloud computing; enterprise context; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; business motivation modelling; BMM; decision making; SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises; context-aware decisions; cloud adoption.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2015.067709

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2015 Vol.4 No.1, pp.47 - 62

Received: 10 Sep 2013
Accepted: 29 Dec 2013

Published online: 18 Mar 2015 *

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