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Recent days in India the IT industry is buzzing around two important aspects of future trends namely the BPO and the e-Governance. The two have also shown a synergistic development opportunities for IT Companies.Economic Times of 22nd November highlighted the decision of the Indiana Government in USA to cancel an outsourcing contract to TCS under creating more opportunities for Indiana Citizens. This revived the discriminatory trade practices first introduced by the New Jersey Government and depressed the Indian sentiments. This also raised a question mark on the much touted BPO prospects.
As if to counter the sentiments, Economic Times of 23rd November carried the headlines about the plans of Cognizant to hire over 3000 professionals and a desire to enter BPO operations in a big way.
The two reports have sent a confusing set of signals to the industry observers. Is there a business opportunity in BPO? for Indian IT Companies? If so is it again dependent on USA? is a question that we need to ponder over.
In the mean time the deliberations of the 7th E-Governance Conference which concluded in Chennai last week, had discussed several E-Governance initiatives of different State Governments. As an immediate follow up the Kerala Government came up with a prominent advertisement in Economic Times of 22nd about the E-Governance initiative planned for the State which has made all major IT Companies sit up and take notice. This advertisement talks about creating an E-Governance backbone for the entire State of Kerala and a huge investment can be foreseen in the next few years for this purpose. The possibilities of several other States following suit to catch up with AP and Karnataka cannot be ruled out.
In recent days, E-Governance projects in India have shown an inclination to adopt the BPO route for service delivery to keep the investment cost low. Hence the E-Governance related developments have relevance to BPO operations.
Unfortunately however, many IT companies have a perspective of BPO which is only oriented towards foreign principals and often nothing more than a Call Center or a Call Center like operations. Such an approach lacks vision and commits the resources of the Company to a low value addition venture.
India has already missed opportunities in the Software sector where our companies have merrily parted with the valuable IPR for short term gains in the form of "Projects". Even big companies such as Infosys have only managed to create more IPR wealth for their project owners rather than themselves. It is time that at least in this BPO opportunities, our IT Companies should try to raise above merely providing Call center services and try to offer value added services.
Similarly, instead of looking only at the foreign currency revenues, our top IT Companies have to invest their talents in Indian E-Governance ventures which may ultimately open up opportunities abroad also.
The skills have to be created, tested, proved and IPR protected in India and then move out as value added services to the foreign market. Then the long term wealth creation of the country would be ensured.
Now is the opportune time for the top 10 IT Companies to enter E-Governance operations in India and to focus on BPO projects which involve development of customized software to address specific business requirements of the business and offer them as a BPO solution. Such opportunities abound in E-Governance, Finance and Health Care services. Even if this market is tapped partially, we can hope to see a revolution in the prospects of the Indian IT Companies.
Do our IT bigwigs have the right vision?..We need to wait and see.
November 23, 2003
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