BPO standards to be set

By Christelle du Toit, ITWeb senior journalist

Johannesburg, 11 Jul 2008

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) will for the first time set standards for business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in the country.

Keryn House, an executive at Business Process Enabling SA, speaking on behalf of the SABS, says the standards will the first of their kind in SA, and have been two to three years in the making.

"They are based on international and local best practice, and we are looking to not only incentivise their uptake ourselves, but are talking to government to incentivise it as well."

The BPO industry employs between 65 000 and 80 000 people in SA, and is expected to provide 100 000 direct and indirect jobs by 2010.

Consulting firm Frost & Sullivan says hosted contact centres in Europe, Middle East and Africa earned 227.9 million euros in revenue last year, and estimates this will more than quadruple in size by 2014, to reach 1.45 billion euros.

These standards, once published, will relate to incoming, outgoing and back-office possessing operations. They deal with leadership, HR issues, operational matters and technical resources.

House says data security features to some extent in all four of these areas, as SA has hundreds of pieces of legislation that deal with the storage of data and how to secure it.

"The standards, for example, set out that employees can't have access to data via USBs and that, from a technical point of view, companies need to use things like access codes," she explains.

"It is using and simplifying what the legislation says in a very user-friendly way, especially for small businesses. They can now understand things that were never explained to them before, as well as get some strategy insight."

This week, the window period for industry input closed, allowing the SABS and its partners to finalise the standards for publication.

These will be a step-by-step best practice model for BPO operations and will be available for a couple of hundred rands at the SABS Web site.

House says once published, the standard will be constantly updated, to ensure it remains relevant.