We’re proud to announce our role as exclusive research and content development partner for NASSCOM’s Business Process Management Summit 2015, to be held in Bangalore, on September 24th-25th.
We’ve been closely working with NASSCOM in designing this year’s theme: “The Emerging Digital Economy: Thrive, Survive or Die”, developing session topics, identifying speakers, supporting content for key speeches and producing a definitive white paper on the Digital theme, in addition to supporting the marketing and promotion of the event. This year, I will be hauling myself back to India along with Charles Sutherland to deliver a keynote presentation on the Emerging Digital Economy and its impact on the BPM industry, along with helping organize the other sessions and content themes.
At the NASSCOM BPM summit, participants will debate the emergence of digitally empowered business process services in horizontal areas such as finance, procurement, supply chain and HR, in addition to industry domain specialties, such as financial services, healthcare, life sciences, retail and manufacturing.
Key Digital Themes being discussed at the 2015 NASSCOM BPM Strategy Summit 2015:
Embracing Design Thinking: Generating creative solutions by understanding the business context
Smartly Automating: Blending of automation, analytics, and talent
Intelligently Managing Data: Applying analytics models and techniques to achieve meaningful business insights
Writing-off Legacy: Use of platform-based services to make many tech investments redundant
Being Brokers of capability: Governance staff managing towards business-driven outcomes
Entrepreneurial Intelligent Engagements: Striving for relationships based on expertise, gain-sharing and outcomes
For members of the HfS global knowledge community interested in speaking at the summit, please email [email protected] .
I recall back in late 2010 when an eager young research firm practiced what it preached and scoured talented resources on the Indian subcontinent to support our research reports. One such resource was a bright young woman called Reetika Joshi, who worked with us to produce the industry’s first ever assessment on “Offshore Analytics Providers.”
Fast-forward four years and said analyst has now survived her first Boston winter (she did nearly perish) to produce a fine assessment on where today’s far more sophisticated analytics services market is today headed:
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Hi Reetika, how do you see the enterprise analytics services market evolving?
The 2015 HfS Enterprise Analytics Services Blueprint Report is a refresh on our initial assessment in November 2013. Compared to 2013, the market is seeing an overwhelming change – an increased focus on applying business context and doing more meaningful analysis, rather than the isolated procurement of analytics tools and technologies. This is impacting the stakeholder dynamic, the decision-making process and day-to-day relationships with service providers for services buyers. It also spells great news for service providers with analytics consulting backgrounds and/or domain expertise for analytics managed services, as services buyers perceive greater confidence in working with these service providers for strategic analytics initiatives that are highly visible in the enterprise. This also means that analytics service providers are having to change their pitches to become less technical (for a non-IT audience) and offer services and solutions that solve specific business challenges. For most service providers, big data and analytics services are the fastest growing businesses in their portfolios. Analytics has been a key area of investment to move up the value chain and provide higher value services for service providers across the market.
In terms of demand, we see managed services grow significantly, while analytics project work remains strong. Services buyers are gradually expanding the amount of ongoing decision support services they do with service providers, beyond short term project based work and routine reporting or data cleaning and consolidation. This is due to growing adoption of data-driven decision making within different parts of the enterprise and the need for more analytical support than internal staff can support. Analytics projects are as prevalent as ever, especially with advancements in big data applicability within specific industry verticals and functions giving rise to new opportunities.
And how did the Blueprint analysis turn out?
Phil, as you know, this year’s Blueprint, based on our updated crowdsourced methodology, has increased the focus on Innovation in analytics service delivery, with 47% of the Blueprint scoring being tied to proven innovation capability and performance for these engagements, beyond the standardized processes in reporting and data management. Overall, we see a shrinking divide between the different categories of enterprise analytics service providers. While this vision hasn’t fully been realized, service providers over the last couple years have invested heavily in developing capabilities across the analytics value chain. Whether they started from traditional strengths in information management, consulting, BI reporting or ongoing research support, they are as aggressive in playing for a piece of the high-value advanced analytics pie with emerging technology expertise. The proof of this pie is in the eating – you can see how placement of service providers across the Blueprint grid is more condensed than in 2013 with high levels of innovation coming from various service providers from a mix of analytics backgrounds.
Winner’s Circle features four mainstays and two new entrants. Accenture, IBM, Infosys and Wipro continue to hold onto their market lead based on solid execution of analytics services and delivering on innovation capabilities that are visible to clients. Cognizant entered this group based on its strong connect with clients – account management, playing in its industry specialist niches for advanced analytics and integrating and modernizing its existing information management business. TCS advanced for a focus on developing industry specific solutions.
Intense competition among the next hopefuls. HfS sees strong competition to the Winner’s Circle coming from Capgemini, Genpact, and EXL amongst others. The gap is becoming much smaller for this next rung of service providers that are investing aggressively to win in a rapidly changing market that is rewarding success across the analytics value chain.
So what are your key takeaways from this study and what should we be watching for in the next few years?
Overall, we believe that the analytics services market is still opportunistic. Service providers are creating more rounded-out offerings by industry verticals and investing with clients to gain more domain expertise in new, emerging areas. Clients, increasingly from business and not IT, are steadily scaling their investments using multiple engagements models depending on their unique business environments and organizational culture. We see an across the board willingness by both services buyers and service providers to experiment in different kinds of pilots and POCs that go into the next level of analytics use case development – not just applying cross-vertical learnings (from retail banking to healthcare), but in conjunction with newer sources of data (e.g. sensors, geolocation mobile data), and new uses of other emerging technologies (e.g. cloud based data warehousing, mobile delivery of reports and insights). Of note, service providers in a bid to develop robust solutions to take to market are funding a significant portion of these initiatives. So expect to see more modernized vertical and functional analytics solutions in the next few years, and a lot more co-innovation coming from service providers partnering with clients and channel partners.
Clients will continue to use a wide mix of internal and external talent and technology for different analytics implementations, with no clear model emerging. For some, carving out standardized and repeatable reporting and analysis tasks for third party providers while honing internal talent to do advanced analytics seems to be the answer. Others are collaborating with service providers for technology decisions and implementations more than ongoing analytics support. Others still are critically reliant on the industry-leading insights generated by their service providers’ staffs that are almost seamlessly blended alongside internal teams.
Increased deployments of big data programs. A lot more clients are willing to make investments in big data platforms and the analytics and reporting services wrapped around them, through careful piloting and experimentation over the last two years. Service providers finally have a growing roster of large-scale client implementations for big data programs, though some are focused in specific functions/industry verticals. We see a significantly higher number of big data platform implementations, along with the surrounding descriptive and predictive analytics layers, reporting dashboards, ongoing decision support and big data consulting capabilities.
Growing aspiration to become an end-to-end analytics partner to clients. Service providers are offering more ‘integrated’ analytics solutions that cut across the analytics value chain (ETL, data prepping and integration, model development, etc.). Instead of focusing on selling these components, providers are promising to integrate them and deliver to business outcomes. However, services buyers in our study were quick to point out relative strengths and weaknesses of the majority of service providers for areas like information management, BI reporting and advanced analytics – both from a capability and perception standpoint. Thus service providers over the next few years will spend much time in a) rebranding their market perception on their ability to service the entire big data and analytics stack and b) integrating and expanding on relatively weak areas. This means more acquisitions to fill gaps, and massive investments in internal capability development. Budgets are now coming from multiple business functions and the potential for growth is huge if the service provider is the first to be established as the company’s enterprise-wide analytics partner – not just for data integration, BI or analytics projects, but essentially a COE to draw various capabilities across this value chain. There are a few examples of where market leaders are experimenting with buyers on this model. Success will be determined by how far the service provider is able to penetrate into the client organization’s functions and processes and impact day to day decision making.
Reetika Joshi is HfS Research Director, Consumer-centric Operations and Analytics Strategies (click for bio)
In summary, the market for enterprise analytics services remains dynamic and evolving and we see potential for significant change to come in 2015 as emerging service providers increase their investments and focus on this offering. We will continue to cover this market throughout 2015 in our HfS soundbites and POVs and expect to see even more improvement in the innovation and execution metrics of all service providers between now and our next Blueprint for this market.
HfS readers can click here to view highlights of all our 21 HfS Blueprint reports.
HfS subscribers click here to access the new HfS Blueprint Report, “HfS Blueprint Report 2015: Enterprise Analytics Services“
After our dramatic fake announcement that we had entered the sourcing advisory business on 1st April, our phones have been ringing off the hook from service providers desperate to get included in our deal pipeline (no joke).
While, in hindsight, HfS& would likely have been a roaring success disrupting the legacy sourcing advisory business, we fundamentally have no desire to be an advisor shop. Sorry. Back to the research grindstone…
And for all of you who sent congratulatory notes, please do read beyond the first paragraph next time we announce something. Especially on April 1st =)
HfS Research, the leading analyst firm covering outsourcing strategies, today launched HfS Advisory (abbreviated to “HfS&”) and announced its exit from the research analyst business. The firm, once lauded for disrupting the research industry by giving its research away for free, finally conceded there is actually no money to me made from a business model where there the core product does not have an associated price tag.
As part of its relaunch as HfS&, the firm announced the following new advisory service lines, designed to disrupt today’s outsourcing advisory marketplace:
1) FTE-Lite . HfS& will disrupt the traditional outsourcing transaction marketplace by offering a series of unique advisory services designed to broker the lowest-priced FTE-based outsourcing deals for enterprise clients. HfS has contracted with a SWAT team of professional negotiators whose fees are paid by the winning service provider, allowing HfS to undercut other advisors by up to 75% on advisor fees.
2) Business Outcomes Definition Creation. HfS& has also recognized a dire need in the sourcing industry to help clients define business outcomes, so that they can be executed on, and ultimately achieved. HfS& intends to use the latest techniques in Design Thinking to make this all happen.
3) Digital Transformation On-demand. HfS& is also getting ahead of the curve with digital transformation, by offering leading edge digital transformation expertise to clients – again at much lower fees to clients as the providers will pay HfS& directly to get invited to the shortlist.
Charles “Hank” Sutherland, preparing to take the reins at HfS&, is spotted trading in his Prius for an F250
4) Robotic Process Automation Starter Kit. HfS& will also move the disruptive advisory needle by offering up real, transformative solutions to help early phase clients take their first baby steps into robotic process automation in one, complete, off-the-shelf do-it-yourself RPA toolkit. Like other advisors, HfS& has actually no clue what it is doing in RPA, but acknowledges it needs to have some semblance of a practice to appear relevant in the market.
As of today, HfS& will no longer produce research and be a fully-fledged outsourcing advisor, and has even made the steps to relocate its headquarters to Dallas, Texas under the watchful eye of Charles “Hank” Sutherland, who today was spotted trading in his Toyota Prius for an Ford F250, equipped with gun rack and complimentary enrollment to the NRA FIRST Steps Shotgun Orientation course.
Commenting on the strategic move, HfS& CEO, Phil Fersht added, “We were getting increasingly fed up giving away all our research for free and getting little appreciation for it from industry. While we did a great job putting our competitors out of business, we found it hard to develop any for ourselves either. So all we really achieved was putting the whole research business out of business. Hopefully, now, we can still glean a few bucks feeding off the stagnant remains of the legacy outsourcing advisory market before that also winds up on the scrap heap of putrid old-world business models.”
Photos of Mr Fersht and Mr Sutherland will be available once you register here.
And of course… this was an:
Please, please don’t tell me you fell for this again! (Even though the business model might kinda work…)
And while we’re reminiscing about falling for April Fools’ gags, here is 2014’s classic:
We couldn’t resist sharing a quick snippet from our new “Eight Ideas of the As-a-Service Economy” study that reveals some rather alarming news: service providers are blaming everyone bar themselves for obstructing their progress towards As-a-Service.
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At fault number 1 – the Clients. Top of the lists are their clients themselves, with 78% of service provider executives (from a pool of 238) citing their unwillingness to venture into risk/gainshare models with them. Considering most enterprise clients we talk to complain that their provider refuses to budge from their predictable, profitable FTE delivery model, baffles me here.
At fault number 2 – the Advisors. Next up are sourcing advisors – those lovely folk who bring them to the table and horsetrade to get deals done. Apparently, they are not selling the evolving model to enterprise clients and are just not very capable. We are starting to see more As-a-Service traits in some mid-tier deals, where there is less wiggle-room to make huge profits on wage arbitrage, and these frequently are too small to warrant several hundred grand being spent on an advisor. The advisor model is still built for the old world of big scale deals, not the new world where analytical and creative skills, technology enablement and automation are the watchwords.
At fault number 3 – the Analysts. And third on the list appears to be a pot shot at analysts, where providers claim a “Lack of quality research to educate the industry on the benefits of As-a-Service models”. We apologise and promise to write more coherently… and this time make sure you read it, Mr and Mrs provider executive, because we know how much time you spend trawling your way through analyst reports these days….
Least at fault – the Providers themselves. And very last on the list (no sh*t) is the fact that they are struggling with their own inhouse talent to shift the model to As-a-Service. Well that’s great news, as I thought it might be a bit of a struggle for providers to retrain their developers and project managers to think analytically, help clients with design thinking, laying out an automation roadmap etc. Now we can all rest easy with the knowledge that the providers will save the day, while the rest of us clients, advisors and analysts can all go away and die somewhere on the scrap heap of legacy labor models, SLAs and dull irrelevant research.
Bottom-line: We’re all pretty much at fault for perpetuating the old models. This is a collective learning effort across all stakeholders to adopt the ideals of As-a-Service
As we reach the end of the runway with the legacy model (which still has a way to go for many enterprises) there needs to be a much better effort collectively to discuss the actual measures enterprises need to adopt to take better advantage of the technology enablers and hone our skills accordingly. Many advisors are clearly still making a good living advising on the old model, otherwise many would cease to exist, while analysts clearly do a poor educating the market on real world examples of how to make the shift (and persist on an old world model themselves to engage with clients). Meanwhile, if service providers are as good as they think they are, they need to find better ways to convince their clients to trust them more, to work with the on joint projects of discovery etc. Lee rhetoric, more dialog among the key stakeholders and better real-world education is the only real formula for success here.
One growing talent issue I have increasingly become concerned about, is observing people whose career development quickly nosedives when they isolate themselves in a work-at-home model.
I personally believe being able to work effectively within a virtual environment warrants a completely different skillset and attitude, if you want to advance your career and keep developing your potential.
So here’s my guide to being an effective virtual worker in six easy steps:
1. Use voice and video as much as you can. Staring into a computer relentlessly typing emails for 16 hours a day with little voice contact with your clients/co-workers makes anyone miserable – and anti-social over time. Make considerable effort to talk to people as much as you can. Use video for conference calls too – it forces everyone to pay attention (and get dressed) and have a much more personal series of dialogs.
2. Sort out your voice technology. There’s nothing worse than communicating with people who have a crappy wifi connection, with whom you can never get a clear skype/google conversation without the echos, constant disconnections etc. If your wifi’s garbage, you can get great quality Skype (for example) over 4g LTE these days on your iPad or iPhone. Oh, and while we’re at it, stop slurping coffee and eating into your microphone on calls, it’s disgusting…
3. Stop using email for every bloody communication. Email is a tool for passing along information and instructions. Learn how to be cordial, get your message across and use voice as much as possible to communicate. Never use email for heated conversations that have emotion (especially negative emotion).
4. Buy an exercise machine and work out everyday. Without fail. You’re sitting on your bum most the day burning zero calories and likely visiting the fridge on an hourly basis. You have to exercise, or you will balloon and die. Buy yourself an elliptical trainer, exercise bike or treadmill, use it everyday, and after a while you’ll get so fit you can even take calls while you get even fitter. I would recommend going to a gym, but who has two hours to carve out when you’re an overworked virtual nutcase glued to your machine all day and night?
5. Invest more time getting out to see your clients, your peers and do more networking. When you see noone bar your family, pets and the plumber on a daily basis, the only way to stay motivated and continue to develop yourself is to go to more conferences, make more effort to visit your clients / peers etc. You learn the most from your collective discussions with others, from having discreet conversations. Everyone’s fed up with social-media – meeting people and being social is back in vogue. Really – get out of the house!
6. Stop complaining about how stressed and overworked you are. Boohoo – just suck it up, we’re all over-bloody-worked. It’s all in the mind – so get healthy, get social again, start enjoying your work and you’ll forget about stress and go with the flow. Just go with the flow, it’s the only way to survive these days.
There endeth my lesson for the day. Go back to your weekend…
We’re shortly going to release the results of our new study delving into BPO talent, which probes into whether there is a genuine career path to follow for BPO and operations professionals, or whether we’re terminally stuck in the “accidental career” we never intended to venture into. In anycase, I wanted to share one set of data points that show which skills have been increasing in significance.
RPA has arrived as a core part of BPO’s future
Over the past year, the skill where demand and expectations has become the most elevated, more than any other, is automation. 65% of service buyers and 69% of provider professionals cite the need to understand and deploy automation is significantly increasing as a skill requirement – and even 61% of advisors are feeling the pressure to knowledge-up.
Essentially, as the room for additional cost savings diminishes for BPO buyers, the logical next step is to reduce manual tasks (and ultimately unnecessary labor costs). With the heavy marketing coming from service providers and technology firms offering robotic process automation (RPA) solutions, the awareness from the buy side – and pressure on operations managers – to have a more defined, measurable automation strategy, has never been as intense as it is today, and is likely to crescendo for some time to come yet. At HfS, we are getting calls every week from buyers wanting support developing an RPA plan for their business – it’s becoming the new efficiency drive for many experienced BPO buyers. Whatever actions buyers eventually take with RPA, they at least need to have some sort of strategy developing to placate the higher-ups questioning where their next 20% of productivity benefits are going to to come from.
The Bottom-line: RPA provides transformation baby steps for buyers wanting away from overdependence on labor arbitrage
RPA provides that logical first step for buyers and service providers to reduce their reliance on throwing lower cost human labor at problems. It provides the building blocks to develop more streamlined end-to-end processes, to perform more meaningful analytics, to create more of a digital infrastructure across the business. Essentially, RPA is the new arbitrage for many, but is unlikely to yield massive cost-savings in the near to medium terms – it is more about helping enterprises deploy their talent on higher value activities. In short, RPA is about working smarter, not cheaper.
Would you believe it? That quirky little research firm that started as a blog, at which many people snickered as a flash in the pan… reached 5 years old this week.
But we actually had a plan – and it was a five year one to break into the analyst mainstream and influence our services markets as much as any of the establishment analysts who’ve been around for years. Have we succeeded in doing that? I’ll leave that to you to decide…
I would personally like to recognize several characters who have played a part in helping HfS get off the ground and developing our reputation in the market as the destination for unvarnished insight, collaborative debate and plenty of entertainment: Esteban Herrera, Tom Ivory, Tony Filippone and Jamie Snowdon for having pride and faith in our mission and playing their part. Reetika Joshi, Charles Sutherland, Ned May, Mark Reed-Edwards, Tricia Bolger, Ned May, Pareekh Jain and Khalda de Souza for their ongoing support of the business and preaching the gospel – and putting up with me.
Fred McClimans, Bram Weerts, Hema Santosh and Barbra McGann for throwing their lot in with us recently to take us to a whole new level. And several friends (and family) who have been active in their support; Deb Kops, Lee Coulter, John Haworth, Sir Alan Fersht, David Poole, Jay Desai and many others. Also our early clients who have stayed loyal; Sarah Thomas, Shari Wenker, Mike Salvino, Ian Maher, Frank D’Souza, Stan Lepeak, Cliff Justice, Tiger Tyagarajan, Frank Cannata and many, many others. If I forgot to mention you, please forgive me as so many of you have been amazing with your support.
Now for our second 5 year plan…. what fun and games are in store for us next?
Happy Springtime all =)
Phil
Some fresh faced healthy looking chap in March, 2010…
Is your enterprise ready for what the future has in store for us?
This emergence of “As-a-Service” represents the most disruptive series of impacts to the traditional IT and business services industry that we have seen.
The globalization wave is peaking, and many maturing enterprise service buyers are struggling to find incremental value from the traditional outsourcing model, such as accessing more meaningful data, achieving better automation of processes, deploying end-to-end process delivery and accessing talent with creative business thinking skills. At the same time, service buyers need to keep driving down their operating costs to a minimum, with globally accessible technology platforms, based on common standards enabled by the cloud.
Looking at this next evolution of value, it is coming from technology-driven “As-a-Service” advancements that directly enhance employee, partner and customer effectiveness.
In short, the way service buyers receive services, and the way service providers sell and deliver them, is going to be very, very different in a few short years, and already some process areas where the technology is already available are being impacted.
At HfS, we have developed Eight Ideals of As–a–Service, that provide a guide for us all to follow as we look to achieving maximum value from our services in the future:
1. Design Thinking
2. Business Cloud
3. Intelligent Automation
4. Proactive Intelligence
5. Intelligent Data
6. Write off Legacy
7. Brokers of Capability
8. Intelligent Engagement
So how is your organization shaping up against these Ideals – and what is most important to you?
Whether you buy, provide or advise on business and IT services, your opinions and intentions are critical for our research, so please spend some time completing our study and you could win an Apple Watch.
Please note that your contact details will only be used for the purposes of sending you the optional executive report and entering you into the prize draw for the Apple Watch.
So please take our survey to air your views and experiences.
One of the main purposes of NASSCOM is to showcase the strength and direction of the Indian IT and BPO services economy. However, it’s not only about the heritage Indian firms promoting their strengths, it’s also a great venue for leading traditional Western-HQed service providers to brand themselves in India, to help them compete for the top talent.
One such service provider that’s made considerable strides in developing a major brand in India is Capgemini, whose staffing base has rocketed to 55,000 and made sure it had a very strong presence at the Mumbai showpiece this year. We managed to grab a side-bar with their dynamic CEO, Aruna Jayanthi, recently voted India’s third most powerful business woman by Fortune magazine, to talk a bit more about herself, her firm and her views on talent the future for India’s services economy…
Phil Fersht (CEO, HfS): Good afternoon, Aruna. Thanks for spending a bit of time with us today. Would you start by introducing yourself and how you got into this business?
Aruna Jayanthi (CEO, Capgemini India): I started with Capgemini 15 years ago. I now run Capgemini India, and before that I ran global delivery for our outsourcing business. I was part of the core team that setup India, and when I joined there were 80 people in India. Today, we are a little over 55,000 (couldn’t say this then due to impending results announcements – will be good to mention the new headcount number as this is current view).
Phil: 55,000. That’s a large number!
Aruna: It is a large number. But in the end, it’s not only numbers that matter; what matters is the value you deliver to your customers.
Phil: Right… so would you talk a bit about your career progression and how you ended up leading the India business for Capgemini?
Aruna: It’s a strange story, because twice in my life I was tempted to get out of the industry and do something else, but somehow I got back in. I started my career with TCS, fresh out business school. I got trained in programming and project management, did account management, the works. Then I thought, that’s enough, let me go try something else. And even though I did something completely different, I ended up in software for another in six years.
Then I decided to get into consulting. So I joined Ernst & Young in India, and within three months it was acquired by Capgemini. At that time, Capgemini didn’t have a presence in India, and the ex-Ernst & Young management consulting team became the core team that set it up and grew our offshore presence.
Phil: Traditionally, Capgemini has had a very strong reputation in Europe and in parts of Asia. And more recently, it’s been investing more in the U.S. and in India. And 55,000 is a big number, even though it’s not about the numbers. Would you talk about that operation and you know how it’s running? And, what do you think is making it successful?
Aruna: 70-percent of our business here is apps-oriented, and the rest is BPO and infrastructure-related services. And more than 90 percent of it is the traditional offshoring model. We do a little bit of work here for local Indian customers, but the bulk of the business is from customers in Europe, North America, and a little bit in Asia Pac.
What differentiates us in terms of value? We’ve managed to blend the India advantage and the local onshore advantage. That local touch is sensitive, it’s important, and we’re very strong with it in Europe and increasingly in North America.
Phil: Aruna, we spoke with several hundred services buyers for a study we’re producing. And the number one issue right now is talent and how to get more access to creative analytical capabilities, that sort of thing. How are you addressing that in India for Capgemini? What sort of people are you trying to hire? What’s the training strategy? What are you doing to try and stay ahead of the talent game?
Aruna: We’ve shifted our talent strategy in the past year and a half. Originally, we focused on lateral recruitment, meaning recruiting experienced hires from the industry. But in the last 18 months, we’ve started hiring far more fresh graduates.
The reason for it is twofold. First, there really aren’t many people already in industry that have experience in the new technology areas we want to build on. They just don’t exist. But I visit university campuses regularly, and look at the stuff they are doing in their labs. They have access to almost all the new technologies, as they get all the licenses at almost no cost. And the students are playing around with cool stuff, which is what we want. Of course, we continue with lateral recruitment when it’s appropriate.
That’s our shift in terms of where we get our recruits. The second shift is in terms of the skills we’re looking for. The Internet of Things, embedded systems, wearables, big data…now we’re focusing on analytics plus business skills. So while engineers were formerly our typical recruits, I think math graduates who have done a bit of business school are actually better.
Phil: So the theme of this year’s NASSCOM was “digital”, at a very high level. And an early takeaway of ours was that probably half of the service providers here get it. They know what’s happening, and they are figuring out what they need to do to get ahead of the curve. The other half they are like deer in headlights. How do you think India is going to make the shift, and do you think there is going to be some collateral damage on the way here?
Aruna: Phil – there is bound to be. My view is that when you look at digital, it’s not about technology. The role of the provider itself is changing. The question is, who understands the shifting role of the provider and how do they see it? Are we strong enough to understand the emerging digital agency, and the fact that if you are going to work on the customer side of it you better understand that side of the business? Is my role to write a program or code a system for somebody? Or is my role to provide a solution for a problem that they have?
So if I take the latter approach of it’s my job is to provide a solution that gives the customer value, then I start to look at building different sets of skills altogether, right? I would start to look at building more consulting skills, more domain skills. My job then becomes an aggregator or an integrator role, as opposed to a software developer role. And I think for me that’s far more important. Providers that understand that shift will do well.
Phil: So, if you were to look out five years to 2020, what do you think we will be talking about?
Aruna: I think we’ll still have a large digital element, but we won’t be talking software or applications anymore. The content will be far more business-focused than IT-focused. Also, I think the definition of the service provider will change. To me, the start-ups will become far more important, and it could be an aggregation of much smaller companies. We may even see a completely different set of providers.
Phil: One final question, Aruna. If you were crowned the Empress of the Indian services industry for one week, what would you change?
Aruna: I would change our positioning. Let’s use cars designed in Germany as an analogy. We talk about German engineering and how great it is, but we never talk about where the cars are manufactured (which I think is most often Mexico.) We just say it’s German engineering. What I would really aim for is that we say, “It’s Indian designed software” or Indian whatever. That’s the value that we need to rebrand ourselves to. It could be delivered from anywhere in the world. But the branding that we need to get to is that this is Indian IT. It is a solution conceptualized in India.
Phil: Precise and to the point, Aruna! Thanks for sharing your insights with our readers – it’s been great to meet you.
Aruna Jayanthi (pictured) is the CEO, Capgemini India. You can view her bio here.
We’re proud to announce our role as exclusive research and content development partner for NASSCOM’s Business Process Management Summit 2015, to be held in Bangalore, on September 24th-25th.
One growing talent issue I have increasingly become concerned about, is observing people whose career development quickly nosedives when they isolate themselves in a work-at-home model.
Phil: So, if you were to look out five years to 2020, what do you think we will be talking about?