What IT industry could learn from the disruption that automation brings

At the Economic Times Roundtable held at Nasscom’s BPM Strategy event, top executives of Indian business process management companies talked about how they have managed the disruption that automation brings and what the IT industry could learn from them.

Rohit Kapoor, CEO of EXL Services; Keshav Murugesh, CEO of WNS; Raman Roy, CMD at Quatrro BPO Solutions and chairman of Nasscom; Mohit Thukral, SVP and Business Leader of BFSI at Genpact; Navneet Kapoor, head of global business at Maersk GSC; and Michel Janssen, Chief Research Guru at consultancy Everest Research; talked about the need to reskill and make the industry take a more global perspective.

The BPM industry has been doing well in the past year judging by this growth we have seen. What’s changed?
Murugesh: A few years ago, I remember the cover of a magazine said, ‘Is India’s BPO industry dead?’ And they had a skull with a headset on it on the cover. I remember as a council we sat down and asked, ‘How do we help people appreciate and understand actually what we stand for? What are the core programs we must run?’ I think there is clarity today from a customer’s point of view that we have all leveraged the model so well, invested in terms of our long-term journeys that the trust factor is high.

Thukral: I think the trajectory of growth that all of us are seeing is predicated on, and most companies which have BPM, have a pivot on digital now. It’s because of some of the deep domain expertise that we’ve all built over the years. I think the technology companies didn’t build that kind of a business level deep expertise. So, I think clubbing the deep domain expertise and the digital capability that we’ve built is actually helping us accelerate some of the growth that we are seeing out there. In a typical IT company, you wouldn’t know who 80% of the people you work with are, because they work completely at the backend. But in a BPM digital environment, 80% of the people are facing the customer or are touching the end-customer in some form or fashion.

The industry has often talked about taking steps to make educational institutions understand the kind of talent that the sector needs. What more needs to be done?
Roy: The big challenge is that there are colleges today that aren’t teaching what’s relevant, and then they come back and say, why aren’t you hiring my output? So as NASSCOM we actively work with academia to help design their courses, we actively work with them to train their professors so that they have the cutting-edge technology. You add to that the challenge that 30-40% of our workforce, which is 4 million people today, over the next three to four years need to be retrained. A lot of them will not gain the competencies. A lot of them think that the job is their right – and therefore, why retrain? We are not a notfor-profit organization, we are not there for philanthropic reasons, we are there for profit and we have to make commercial decisions. So, what we are trying to architect over the next three to five years is playing a big role in the skilling part.

Janssen: I come from 30-some years of experience in this industry, not necessarily from India, but I would challenge NASSCOM to think of itself not as an India domain conversation, but as global leaders. I want to get ready to name you guys as not as global leaders not of India, but of planet earth. So, what does NASSCOM think about developing talent, not for India, but for the support of the entire sourcing and service providers, regardless of whether it’s the US, Europe, or Australia. Because I think that’s what the challenge is, if you guys want to be the players, you’ve got to stop thinking India. You’ve got to start thinking global – the winners are going to be global, truly global.

Murugesh: I think most of us run global companies, and really operate out of 10-15 countries, and we’re also members therefore of similar forums in each one of these countries, and therefore as individual companies, we’re influencing the thinking there. I think what we have to appreciate is the fact that this business, to some extent, was scaled from India. And I like that to use the analogy that India actually has extended its borders to all of the other countries.

Navneet Kapoor: I think the lines between BPM and IT in my mind are going to blur, because the world is technology-driven going forward. So, I have just joined a company, Maersk, which has over 10,000 people in India and we do a lot of business process, customer service kind of work, but our overall business is going to be technology-driven or is already technology-driven. We need to transform our business, digital transformation has to happen, and our processes need to bring technology within themselves or we need to bring the technology closer to the processes. So, we are hiring technologists, data scientists, engineers, within what’s historically been called as a service centre here.

Rohit Kapoor: You asked in the beginning of this conversation as to what is it that the IT companies can learn from the BPM industry? The BPM industry participants underwrite and deliver the business outcome for their clients, and that is why we succeed. The reason we are able to deliver that is because of the domain knowledge. If the IT industry wants to do this, they better start delivering on the business outcome, and I don’t mean fixed price contracts – offering a fixed price just means that you are going to contain the cost to an X level, but it does not guarantee that they will be a ROI on that investment. So, the biggest learning is, I think, they need to deliver on the business outcome and take responsibility for that.

Michel, what should the BPM industry be doing differently to succeed in the new digital age?
Janssen: The challenge I’m giving to you guys, is that you guys are, in some respects global leaders, in different metrics and different things. I look at NASSCOM and say ‘stop being India, start being global,’ and think about what it means to India in that context, and the talent is global. So yes, you need to worry about the Indian universities but you need to worry about the US universities just as much, so that you have that context.

Thukral: All of us are global companies, 35% of our revenue sits in different countries and we service only markets outside of India, actually we don’t serve markets in India. So, we are really pushing the global agenda in a big way. We are doing some big amount of work with Rutgers right now, and building a real analytics talent in the US. And look, the world is pivoting, right. Everything won’t happen in India, a lot of the stuff will happen in global geographies, so talent need is an issue. The U.S. needs 300 thousand data scientists today.

Source: techgig.com