Has anybody heard the name Kjell Nordstrom? No relation to the famous US
retailer, but a Professor at Stockholm University, who I would rank as a
passionate speaker and evangelist par excellence, in the league of Michael
Hammer and Tom Peters. Kjell was a keynote speaker at a recent Financial
Services Customer meet in Monte Carlo, where many of us made presentations on
the challenges facing the financial sector. Describing the new socio-economic
landscape in the US and Western Europe through a speech titled "Bowling
Alone", Kjell painted the picture of the new socio-economic landscape in
the world; where over 50% of Americans and 60% of Europeans (70%-plus in
Scandinavia) now prefer to remain single and go "bowling alone". This
creates new challenges for marketers and all service providers in developing
unique value propositions for a customer size of one, which is what most of our
customers are faced with today.
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Developing his corporate message from this, Kjell pointed out the need to get
closer to the real needs of the customer by understanding and using tacit
knowledge that goes beyond the standard articulated knowledge, which is
predictably less and less in the lonely societies of today. Imagine how much
easier it would be to understand the needs of a group of chattering ladies in
Ahmedabad than it would be to discern the desires of a taciturn individual in a
singles bar in Mumbai and you get the message. For the IT industry, the lesson
is obvious — the new application areas of the future will all be
customer-centric, CRM and SFA applications will rely heavily on extensive data
warehousing and data mining and business and competitive intelligence tools
combined with the yet unexploited potential of KM will prove to be the true
characteristics of corporations dealing with individual customers as well as
providers of these solutions to these corporations in the global marketplace.
Our consulting teams have coined a new acronym called "KEOS", or
Knowledge Enabled Operational Systems for this, and we see every corporation
embracing a KEOS interface to its package implementation and custom built
software to give it the cutting edge in a world full of chaos. This prediction
also comes through in a research project that I have been doing on knowledge
maturity models for the IT industry for IIT, Mumbai, where it is becoming clear
that companies will need to move higher and higher in the knowledge creation,
dissemination and usage cycle to ensure relevance of their value propositions to
an increasingly picky set of customers in the years to come.
Kjell also made two interesting observations that are points to ponder. In
the new world, it is no longer the survival of the fittest but the success of
the sexiest that will be a reality. Note Infosys’ larger than life image
compared to its peers, Wipro and TCS in the top of mind recall of the common
man! But beyond just perception, what this means is that all organizations will
have to develop sexy value propositions that catch the attention and fancy of
the customer and create a "temporary monopoly" if not in the market
place, at least in the mind of the customer. The Indian BPO industry is on the
verge of creating this, if the hype that surrounds this in many world markets is
to be believed.
The second point made by Kjell was that in a market where supply is
outstripping demand by many orders of magnitude (does that sound familiar to
software exporters?), Number One will take all and there is no place for second
best. This is an important message for all of us who are building software
export companies out of India. A set of distinctive value propositions coupled
with all the good and well known capabilities of cost, quality and delivery
capability will have to be developed and honed by every firm and marketed as the
new India advantage as we continue to compete for pole position in the global IT
marketplace!
Ganesh Natarajan
The author is deputy chairman & MD of Zensar Tech and chairman of Nasscom’s
SME Forum for Western India