BusinessProcessOutsourcing (BPO) is a variant of OutSourcing where the activities that are outsourced are bounded by "self-contained" business functions, e.g. Accounting Services.
An example of BPO is the migration of all inhouse accounting functions to offices to a different location where labour costs are much cheaper. I believe Hong Kong based Cathy Pacific Airways did such a move ten years ago and moved Accounting to main land China.
Contrast this type of OutSourcing with the commonly seen Call Centre outsourcing. The Call Centre could be handling service requests and co-ordination for a variety of business functions within the organization.
BPO can be effected through InternationalOutsourcing mechanisms.
There are initiatives being implemented by State governments to effect BusinessProcessOutsourcing to a centralized SharedServices division, overseen typically by Treasurey. These usually include IT intensive (and thus expensive) EnterpriseResourcePlanning applications. Objective of these programs are to save labor, software and hardware costs.
InformationSecurity targeted
SecurityIsHard. So firms are expected to unload inhouse activities to Managed Service Providers. See link in SecurityManagement which it is said antispamming services being done outside will expand to include entire suite of security processes.
EditHint: This topic is not large enough to separate out from OutSourcing in my opinion. Other opinions?]