Nasscom draws roadmap for success of IT enabled services

By Our Corporate Reporter

CHENNAI, MAY 30. The two day Nasscom's national conference on IT enabled services got off to a good start here today. The theme for this year's event is "Generating one million jobs by 2008" and the aim is to provide a roadmap for the IT enabled services industry in India to enable the country to emerge as a sustainable destination for IT enabled services.

Inaugurating the event, Mr. D. Prakash, Secretary-IT, Government of Tamil Nadu (state sponsor of the event), said IT enabled services has aroused considerable interest amongst all State governments. ``To realise the potential of this sector we have been organising various IT enabled services conferences in multiple locations across the state in centres such as Coimbatore, Tiruchi, Madurai and the response has been encouraging."

Mr. Prakash said "We are confident that this sector will help create employment for a large number of students emerging from our university programme, who will not necessarily require any special technical skills to become a part of this revolution. This is especially encouraging keeping in mind our demographic profile and I am confident we will be able to achieve the projected target of one million jobs by 2008."

In his keynote address titled `Geography is history' Mr. Simon Roncoroni, Consultant of the U.K. based SRC Limited, specialising in call centres, said only 17 per cent of calls in traditional customer service call centres gave rise to an up-sell or cross- sell opportunity and 50 per cent of the service centres in the U.S. did not have a formal mechanism of collecting customer data. He said call centres were end-to-end service entities functioning as total service centres, contact centres, customer centres, customer interaction centres and relationship centres.

He said costs were attractive in India and Indians should not compromise on quality by reducing costs. Instead they should add value and the surplus income should be ploughed back and invested in technology for value addition. He said in the U.K. a survey conducted on 1,000 data analysis professionals, 42 per cent said information held in loyalty schemes was inaccurate and 80 per cent said they had been placed in wrong income category. If a single call was badly handled, 78 per cent would go to an alternative supplier, he said.

Commenting on the IT enabled services sector Mr. Phiroz Vandrevala, Chairman Nasscom said "We hope to leverage the positive brand identity of the Indian IT sector, to help India emerge as a sustainable destination for IT enabled services as well. However for this industry to achieve its true potential, it is essential that we take a long term perspective to this opportunity and create IT enabled units only after conducting a thorough due diligence and a long term strategic perspective for the business."

Emphasising the need for India to position itself on quality rather than price, Mr. Arun Seth, Chairman, programme committee, Nasscom said " For India to emerge as a sustainable hub for IT enabled services, it will be essential that we start positioning ourselves on quality rather than price as that is what is driving the outsourcing decision for large international companies. The Indian IT enabled sector is set for exponential growth and the onus is now on the industry and the Government to ensure that the requisite building blocks such as standards, HR practices, infrastructure and a financial and legal framework is created to ensure its success."

Mr. Bhatnagar, vice president E-Funds International, said, opportunities for IT enabled services existed in India in the back office transaction processing in the banking and financial sector, call centres, customer interaction services and any process which could be unbundled and did not require face-to-face customer interaction.

Today Ireland was recognised as the back office operations hub of the world, he said.

The IT enabled services event has over 30 Indian and international speakers addressing various industry issues and challenges such as recruitment, new technology solutions and applications.

Some of the key speakers include Mr. Kishore Patel, British Telecom, (U.K.), Mr. Tony Hales, Healthscribe (U.K.), Mr. Raman Roy, CEO Spectramind (India) and Mr. Ramesh Venkatraman, Principal, McKinsey & Co.

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