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Strategies for service

The post-lunch session at Hotel Westend here where the second day of NASSCOM'97 is busy, focused on 'Strategy to move up the service value chain'.

An interesting perspective on the state of the software professionals and the IT industry in 2005, as revealed by 'newspaper clippings', is the hypothetical presentation of Lucent Technologies' Krishna Tanuku.

T O D A Y

• Brain damage • Newbies and freebies • Strategies for service • Cybercity talks end

"Reports in the papers of the next century would scream: 'Indian software industry at breaking point' and 'Targets remain unachieved'. They have fallen short of being global players and the productivity does not match global standards," will be the refrain, Tanuku warns.

He claims that the industry is madly racing somewhere into the future with very ambiguous figures and benchmarks. For instance, "A company always says it will increase productivity by 30 per cent or 40 per cent, but if you ask them the factor that will determine productivity, they are unable to explain. They have no strategy."

"Today we are analysing our employees' strengths and weaknesses, helping them reach goals and thereby helping our companies to quantify the money spent and the exact returns that he or she get at the end of the day.

"We spend a lot of time planning the life-cycle of our products, but what about some plans for productivity," he asked.

"If organisations could evolve a joint national strategy, each could decide on a profit margin within a time-frame, and then integrate the resources to provide training centres for employees across all boards to achieve a consolidated national figure. No concerted effort has been made by organisations to achieve global targets," he lamented.

To escape a disaster we have to be innovative in planning policies that will look into the problems of infrastructure and the market. We have to reinvent ourselves in every dimension to climb up the value chain.

Neeraj Bhargava of McKinsey and Company agrees that though a lot of companies are thinking of ways to move up the value chain, it is not being done "the holistic way". He suggests that we stay focused on working at large projects, improve our marketing skills and charter a new course for development with realistic time-frames.

The consensus remains that despite the fact that China, the Philippines and Malaysia are catching up, we still have certain advantages like an English-speaking professional population and low manpower cost. These may help us keep abreast, if not ahead, in the global software market.

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