Rebirth of the Indian Techie

Posted on March 15, 2011 | Author: Shelley Singh | View 26

About 7.5 million fresh workers will join the growing army of IT-BPO employees this decade.
At least half of this workforce, however, will no longer be in demand for its accents or coding
talents but for its specialist skills.

Pavitra Aggarwal, 41, has been a techie for more than a decade. He has seen and done it all—the
Y2K opportunity, the rise of technology services, projects for global corporations and plenty of
travel. Now as director, engineering, at a Noida-based software company, Aggarwal is witness to
a distinct transformation – the common or garden code jock is evolving into a specialist. After
years of doing peripheral, low-value tasks like supporting IT systems, more and more workers in
IT services and business process outsourcing (BPO) are evolving into experts in their respective
domains.

This also means that the engagement with clients is more intense than before. “When I began my
career, I met the client for the first time only after four years into a job,” says Aggarwal. “Now a
newcomer engages with a customer in six months.”
Cut to Mumbai where Gloria Giri, 37, is playing a key role in creating specialist BPO workers.
Ironically, Giri, who has been with WNS Global Services for the past 14 years, was hired by the
BPO major mainly for her ability to speak English with a British accent.

“The mandate was: ‘can you handle, say, 25 calls per hour?’ I was a customer service agent, and
the work then was an extension of college life,” says the graduate of St Xavier’s College. These
days when Giri vets new recruits, accent is last on her priority list. Right on top are questions
like: do you know the customer’s business? Or what’s the difference between the P&L for a
logistics company and that for a consumer durables company? “We are solving business
problems— for instance, we are focused on cutting down time in moving cargo rather than just
tracking delivery of cargo shipments. For this new recruits need to be specialists in cargo
operations,’’ says Giri.

At another Mumbai-based technology services company, Seema Sharma, 27, joined recently as
an engineer. “They were not too interested in my programming skills. That’s a given. The
emphasis is on consulting,’’ says Sharma.

Developing Solutions
As the IT-BPO industry seeks to make the leap from revenues of $70 billion to $225 billion by
2020, largely by doing higher value work and de-linking revenue growth from that of manpower,
the role of techies is changing. They won’t be just maintaining IT systems but will be engaged in
developing new technology solutions.

Growing revenues without a proportionate increase in headcount is an imperative for the IT

services industry. That will help it counter the threat of wage inflation even as it begins to use its
people more efficiently. Over the past few years, tier-I companies have slowly but surely
generating more revenue per employee. For 2009-10, Infosys had revenue per employee of
$42,215. That’s lower than the 2009 figure for global majors like Accenture ($131,000 ) and
IBM ($220,000). But Infosys is improving.

Last quarter, it averaged $12,404, up 1.5% over the September quarter.

Says Praveen Bhadada, manager, consulting, Zinnov Management Consulting: “It’s not just a
quest to bring in value but also a move to ensure sustainable, high margins for companies and
more meaningful, well-paying jobs for employees.’’ This will also make Indian IT look more
like their global peers like IBM and Accenture who pride themselves for their deep expertise.
Employees are responding to the challenge in style.

For example, those working on credit card related transactions are moving from answering
queries on outstanding amounts to researching the market for new products. R Swaminathan,
chief people officer, WNS Global, explains that the bar has been raised from selling credit cards
to managing customers, creating reward programmes and handling customer churn. “For this I
can’t take a fresh graduate and train him for six weeks. I need people who understand risk
analytics and market analytics, so an MBA or a BSc in Statistics is more relevant,’’ adds
Swaminathan.

A better customer experience

Another example: the travel industry is keen to hire techies who can create solutions for a better
customer experience than those trained in customer service and ticketing operations. For the
current 2.5 million workforce, the shift towards higher value work means acquiring new skills.
More than half of the other 7.5 million that will enter the system in the coming decade, reckon
industry observers, will have—or need to have—specialist skills rather than plain vanilla
qualifications. That’s because IT and BPO workers today are expected to think more like
business leaders, engage with business heads and work closer to the heart of business. Says TV
Mohandas Pai, HR head and board member, Infosys Technologies: “This decade will see the rise
of domain experts. We need specialists.’’

Those specialists could be medical professionals working with global pharma clients for
outsourcers like Cognizant or even niche players like the Chennai-based Take Solutions. These
companies have graduated from back office support to clinical data management and molecular
research.

Says Raman Roy, chairman & managing director, Quatrro BPO Solutions: “If you pick up a
global pharma research report it’s likely that the analysis of clinical trials on which it’s based
were done out of Gurgaon or Bangalore.’’ Quatrro has 600 engineers and doctors in its team of
3,000.The London-based, $33 billion AstraZeneca is one of Cognizant’s large pharma clients.
The relationship started with application services, which needed engineers.

But a Clinical Data Management (CDM) deal that Cognizant won in 2008 was largely because of
investments it made in doctors, pharmacists, bio-statisticians, medical writers and the like. The
company also acquired a Gurgaon-based pharma market research firm called marketRx to access
experts in CDM. CDM refers to analyzing data that comes out of trials of new drugs on rats or
any other monitored group. Cognizant works with more than a dozen pharma companies in
CDM, including Pfizer, Sanofi and AstraZeneca.