Abstract:

The BPO wiki aims at becoming a publicly available body of knowledge in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). Its development was initiated in May 2013 by a group of students taking a specialization course in BPO offered by the Master of Business Administration and Engineering (MBA&E) at the HTW Berlin.

The BPO wiki’s first purpose is to improve the extent and coherence of publicly available knowledge on BPO. This is to be achieved by drawing upon various sources in an academic manner, composing objective wiki articles around various relevant themes and ensuring robust hyperlinking practice. The second objective is to suggest a standard terminology in BPO. This is currently not the case as even fundamental terms carry several alternative definitions.

To develop a theoretical foundation, a literature survey first summarizes the history, technical implementations and didactical uses of wikis in higher education.

In the following paragraphs, the BPO wiki is introduced and the origins and the current state of the project are presented. The paper will then lay down the development milestones for the wiki, as well as the plan and the criteria for its public release. Finally, methods for using the wiki in teaching BPO to postgraduate Master students are discussed; and the results of an interview study charting students’ experiences with the wiki so far are presented.

Keywords:

Wikis, higher education, business process outsourcing (BPO).