D.Murali

Pradeep Nevatia, President and CEO of Ninestars Information Technology Ltd, is passionate about distributed delivery model for large-scale data processing, be it in the form of village BPO (business process outsourcing), college campus BPO, or as a CSR (corporate social responsibility) activity.

“Distributed delivery model is not a new phenomenon. The ‘manufacturing’ sector knew it long ago,” explains Mr Nevatia. With the support of technology the concept should in fact be taken to higher and higher levels, he adds during a recent lunch-hour interaction with Business Line.

“I see it reaching a level where the employee’s workplace is ‘home’ – 100 per cent distributed. The only good and important reason to have an office is to facilitate interaction amongst the employees at social levels and for creating synergetic effects.”

Ninestars – a content transformation company providing services to newspaper publishers, broadcasters, content aggregators, media monitoring companies, STM (science, technology, and medicine) publishers and government organisations – was founded in 1999, and has over 1100 people working out of Bangalore, Chennai and Kanchipuram (www.ninestar.co.in).

Mr Nevatia, a post-graduate in industrial engineering from NITIE, Mumbai and an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, is a JUSE-trained TQM (total quality management) expert. He has co-authored, ‘Brand-Wise: Leveraging People to Create Powerful Brands’ (2004, EastWest Publications).

We take forward our conversation over the e-mail. Excerpts.

You look at ‘village BPO’ as a viable option. Do we have the numbers about the economics of the proposition? Are such BPOs successful? What impediments does the concept of rural BPO face? Do we need any policy shifts?

If we look at the demography of a typical city in India, 60 per cent of its population is floating, and comprises wage-earners from nearby villages. Also, if you look at the growth of manufacturing in any country, it has always been in villages or on the outskirts of a city.

As soon as we recognise that BPO and manufacturing are essentially no different, the problem of ‘city vs village’ would vanish. I have personally experimented ‘village BPO’ including the first-ever ‘village BPO,’ and the results are extremely good.

The cost reduces by minimum 25 per cent owing to lower infrastructure cost and manpower cost. The employees stay with their family and spend negligible time and money on travel. The other important advantages seen are in lower absenteeism, lower attrition and strong discipline leading to higher productivity, quality and employee retention cost.

‘Village BPO’ is more an effort to distribute employment equally among villages, towns and cities. The support required is to develop simple and low-cost infrastructure in villages, availability of power, high-speed connectivity and employee training schools.

Initially the Government has to extend support in these areas to attract the attention of the decision makers and the project managers in the industry. Else it is tough work in the beginning. I have experimented successfully with some corporate bodies, NGOs and even educational institutions, borrowing their infrastructure and creating value for the locals through some of these ‘village BPOs’.

Your work involves the transforming of archived content into a digital form. What are the specific challenges in this?

Digitisation of content is a simple process once the right workflow is put in place – the required skill-set to do this is also available in plenty. However, the challenge now is in creating value beyond the physical digitisation. The specific challenges are:

* Infusing comprehensive flexibility into the content enabling the manipulation of it from anywhere.

* Making the content compatible with the ‘new media’ like mobile phones, interactive broadcasting and even interactive print media.

How much of content is waiting to be ‘transformed’? Any estimates of the biz potential?

Estimation of the ‘content to be transformed’ is not a very useful exercise. One cannot truly estimate the quantum of the mammoth ‘content reservoir’ as its growth rate is faster than the fastest jet! The issue is to roll up the sleeves and start cordoning it and putting the same to use with strong value propositions.

What are the skills that are the most apt for your kind of work? Are there any shortages?

Data capture and manipulation is simple now as plenty of skill is available in this area. However, a new requirement is shaping as a crying need not only for ‘content transformation’ but for the entire IT (information technology) and BPO industry as such. There is the need to induct a huge dose of ‘creativity’ and ‘analytical mind’ into the industry – ‘value creation’ is a ‘research job’.

You emphasise on learning from manufacturing. What are the lessons that IT can learn from manufacturing?

I see no difference between ‘manufacturing’ and ‘BPO’. The only difference is that in manufacturing one is able to see the produce of the process. The principles of value creation are the same – be it in planning, organising, leading or controlling/managing. However, the distance with the end user/customer is considerably reduced in the case of BPO.

Therefore the attitude and emotions management become very important. The service attitude is very critical to successful customer management. Indians are genetically good at this. However, the irony is that most of us are ignoring this aspect in the name of modernisation and inclination towards the west.