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Read about the author Sudhindra Mokhasi, read his blog, see his tour schedule and events in your city and register for a book event. Write to the author. Read his columns in newspapers and more... |
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Sudhindra's writes a fortnightly column in Deccan Chronicle / Asian Age in the Business - Technomics section. This column 'Tech-Sutra', will appear every alternate Monday starting 15th Jun 2009.
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Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, London
Monday, 9th November 2009
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:: Business / Technomics
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Tech-Sutra In Big B's shadow
9th November 2009
Sudhindra Mokhasi
An interesting combination of genesis, history, and environment has concocted a situation in India where BPOs don't get due recognition.
For the genesis and history, here are some excerpts from my book BPO-Sutra: "After 2000, the US was passing through a slowdown, offshoring to India had become a proven business model and Indian IT firms were looking for avenues to supplement their software work.
Every industry's DNA and culture is determined by the image built by its leaders and pioneers. All of us know that the Indian IT industry started off doing global find-replace during the Y2K times, then gradually moved up to high end work. But what a lot us don't know is that even today a significant amount of work is routine software maintenance and testing.
Yet all of IT is still viewed as high-end work because of the sustained iconic image building.
The BPOs, in contrast, mainly started off as cost centres of MNCs and didn't need to have an icon to speak of and were clueless of their image and identity.
To hide the monotony of the job, attract people and to cater to aspirations of a westernised life, they were portrayed as fun jobs.
The type of job you take up for a while, do some work in IT like offices, meet pretty women at night, travel in the office provided transport, earn good money, have a party, and then move onto other things in life.
Management implicitly parroted it, HR sold it, employees started acting it and everyone started believing it. If you wanted your weekly quota of drink and dance, you walked up to your manager and said: `Hey you know what, my team morale seems to be a little down lately and I plan to take them out for a bonding-de-stressing session'. And you and your team could party at the hottest party place in town on expense account."
BPOs in India, having come after IT, also suffer from the `In the shadow of a more illustrious celeb syndrome'.
I was once discussing this `burden of comparison' and by extension `burden of expectation' with an IT icon. He said while celebrity-association/lineage open many doors and opportunities, it is also an extremely heavy burden to carry. He beautifully summed it up by saying: "Imagine the burden an offspring of Lawrence Braggs would carry -- having both father and grandfather for Nobel laureates."
For me, it also raised interesting questions like ...what if a Rahul Dravid or a Saurav Ganguly had not played in the Sachin Tendulkar era ...
From these wild-wild west beginnings, BPOs have come a long way.
Once the business potential became evident, the industry initiated a major internal clean up act as well as a public image makeover exercise.
NASSCOM ran a campaign and Indian IT players started integrating BPOs into their IT based image.
The growth rate been consistently more than IT for some years now, the move up the value chain into KPOs like equity analysis and legal process is happening fast and, more importantly, there is a growing societal acceptance of the BPO as a more broad-based employer and belief in its sustainable viability as a career option.
There is also the growing understanding that industries can resemble the wild wild west at start up and then mature into a more responsible avatar. And that it employs close to a million people directly and another two million in the eco-system helps!
Sudhindra Mokhasi is CEO of a technology firm and author of ‘BPO-Sutra: True stories from India’s BPO & Call Centers’
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