Specifying Business Process Outsourcing Requirements

Outsourcing enterprises' data, business processes and applications to the Cloud is emerging as a major trend thanks to the Cloud offerings and features. Basically, enterprises expect when outsourcing to save cost, improve software and hardware performance and gain more flexibility by responding to the dynamic customers' requirements. However, adopting the Cloud as an alternative environment for the management of the business processes leads to a radical change in the enterprise IT infrastructure. Furthermore, additional challenges may appear such as data security, vendor-lock-in and labor union rendering the outsourcing decision require a deep analysis and knowledge about the business processes context. Assisting enterprises' experts in the business process outsourcing to the Cloud decision is the focus of this paper: it extends the BPMN 2.0 language to explicitly support the specification of outsourcing concepts, and it presents an automated approach to help decision makers identify those parts of their business process that benefit most from outsourcing to the Cloud. Using this extension helps also in identifying Cloud services considered as the most suitable to support the outsourced business process requirements.