front office

Noun

front office (plural front offices)

1. An office where members of the general public can contact or consult when dealing with an organization.
   • She had introduced herself to an elderly, shapeless secretary in the front office, but wasn't convinced that the woman had heard her.2014, Steffen Jacobsen, Trophy, →ISBN
   • A woman in the front office invited me to wait in the director's office.2014, Jim Auton, The Secret Betrayal of Britain's Wartime Allies, →ISBN, page 76
2. (attributive, figuratively, often) The systems or divisions of an organization that deal with customer or public interactions or revenue generation.
   • The demand for real-time risk calculations and regulatory capital optimization enables the traditional risk management functions to be integrated into the front office to involve them in the decision-making process.2014, Raghurami Reddy Etukuru, Enterprise Risk Analytics for Capital Markets, →ISBN, page 335
   • The primary function of the transactional HR SSC is the performance of the back- and front-office functions and processes through deployment of the operational service delivery capabilities.2014, Tanya Bondarouk, Shared Services as a New Organizational Form, →ISBN, page 159
3. The executive or policymaking officers of an organization.
   • Any good undercover agent ruffled a few feathers in the front office, and Jake more often than not upset the entire henhouse.2014, Oliver North, Bob Hamer, Counterfeit Lies, →ISBN, page 119
   • Sabean insisted he kept Posey at Triple A because the front office wasn't convinced the rookie could excel behind the plate in the big leagues.2015, Andrew Baggarly, Duane Kuiper, A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants, →ISBN, page 12