OUTSOURCING FROM THE POSITION OF THE SYSTEMS THEORY

The paper analyzes the latest research on outsourcing in business practice as an element of a complex business system. There is proposed approach to analyze the impact of outsourcing on companies from the point of view of systems theory and graph theory. It is shown that any complex business organization with the aim of sustainable and long-term increase of its fundamental value can be conceptually described with the help of two types of graphs. The first type is a graph of material flows, where the processes of processing material flows are carried out at the vertices. The material flows themselves are determined by the edges of the graph. The second type is an information graph at the vertices of information processing and managerial decision-making processes. This is a reasonably general descriptive scheme, but it allows us to separate two fundamentally different graphs in term of achieving the organization's goal. The material graph is relatively stable and represents a general description of material flow processing processes. The information graph on contrary, has a rather dynamic nature and can change, responding to changes in information flows affecting the organization. In addition, it is the information graph that plays a primary role in changing the structure of the material graph and, in fact, controls the change in the structure of the material graph. In the framework of information theory, an essential characteristic of an information graph is its information capacity. From an information theory perspective, outsourcing represents an additional «information word.» If the balance between information capacity and information diversity is disturbed, the information graph of the organization will not be able to process all the information diversity, and, as a result, this leads to problems in achieving the organization's goal due to the inconsistency of the structure of the material graph. Further research will be aimed at finding adequate methods that would make it possible to reasonably describe the influence of the organization's material and information graphs on its purpose.