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Book Review
Outsourcing business
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
BLIND MEN & THE ELEPHANT — Demystifying the Global IT Services Industry: Was Rahman and Priya Kurien; Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., B 1/11, Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area, Mathura Road, New Delhi- 110044. Rs. 395.
In the run-up to the U.S. Presidential elections, in mid 2004, paranoia about American jobs lost to the Indian Information Technology Services (ITeS) industry was at its zenith — with Lou Dobbs at CNN playing nightly on the insecurity of US-based employees, Democratic candidate John Kerry promising to leap to their rescue if elected — and tee shirts selling on e-Bay for $ 20 a go, emblazoned with the message, “My job went to India and all I got was this l
ousy tee shirt.”
Just three years later, outsourcing — and offshoring — seem to have been accepted by American high-tech corporations as an inevitable, even essential, business option in the desperate race to remain competitive. At a recent IT summit in Bangalore, Nasscom’s outgoing President, Kiran Karnik, reported that from being outsourcing’s ‘big, bad wolf”, India is now the number one choice: “American business houses ask their consultants: ‘Have you an Indian option for us?’ the moment they decide to outsource,” he said.
The authors, Was Rahman and Priya Kurien, are Chief Executive and Managing Director, respectively, of Dolphin Advisory, an Indo-UK consultancy, which nurtures entrepreneurs in their quest to find and retain larger, more international markets. This equips them to write with authority, backed by deep personal knowledge, about the global IT services industry, tearing away some of the veils of misconception and adding layers of new understanding. The title, which recalls the fable of the six blind men stumbling upon an elephant and coming to vastly different conclusions, is apt: ITeS, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Offshored services, Call Centres… such terms often used as synonyms for the same phenomenon, have tended to confuse lay readers as well as many seasoned professionals.
The authors set out to demystify the whole outsourcing business by recalling that it is not something born in the dotcom era: the first documented instance of outsourcing date to the 1940s when attempts (which ultimately failed) were made to automate the operations of the famous, and now sadly defunct, Lyons tea shop chain in the U.K., with a computer developed in Cambridge, called Leo.
Destination India
The emergence of India as a formidable outsourcing destination is traced — but the book, unlike so many on this subject, in recent years — takes a more international view of the industry, assessing the strengths of leading players like IBM, EDS and Accenture, while not neglecting Indian icons like TCS, Infosys and Wipro. This is a sensible precaution: India is being increasingly challenged by other cost-effective offshore destinations in the Asia-Pacific region and secondary outsourcing — by Indian players to even cheaper operational areas — is already a reality. Most usefully, the book suggests how potential players could do a bit of second guessing, anticipating future trends and challenges, before they overwhelm them. They list “four-seeable” futures: which might end up as crisis or opportunity, depending on one’s degree of agility.
Blind Men and the Elephant is an easy, refreshingly jargon-free read, and unlike those “Six Men of Indostan” in the John Saxe poem, the reader can expect to achieve useful understanding of this important subject without any preliminary groping.
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