The management of large companies has posed difficulties for senior executives for many decades. The desire to increase shareholder value has driven the pursuit of new ways to organise management activities and many new management models have emerged as a result. In the 1970’s, the Multinational Corporation emerged as companies, primarily from the US, attempted to create a structure which would allow them to exploit market opportunities in a number of different international markets. These large companies were fully integrated taking responsibility for all value chain activities in-house. The nineties, on the other hand, have seen global companies move to a ‘core competence’ business model focusing on areas of strength and outsourcing many non-core activities.

Industries such as Banks, Airlines require large scale data entry and revenue accounting work to be done. For revenue accounting and other backoffice accounting operations, paper documents / raw data are sent to remote locations, which are used for data entry and necessary reconciliations. Using high speed datacom links for their backoffice and data processing operations, these banks, airlines and other organisations with extensive data turnover and customer interface, are able to save costs and valuable resources. The prime concern of these companies is 100% availability of data and uptime of facilities. In other words, such a centre could be realised simply as an offshore extension of existing information and backoffice operations promising constant availability.

Over the last few years, there has been a steadily growing trend to outsource these services to major IT service providers with contracts running into decades. The prime criteria for such projects is quality of organisational processes, availability of abundant manpower and ability to dedicate resources to clients’ needs.