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Crash into the Cash-Box

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DQI Bureau
New Update

The Indian infotech industry’s results’season that

just concluded was a mixedbag. While Infosys expectedly exceeded street

expectations and briefly dragged the market northward, Wipro’s results

deflated the euphoria and raised jitters about the future of the software export

sector all over again. With analyst reports unsure about anything more than a

low double-digit growth and the expected tech revival still two quarters away,

the real winners are expected to be those who are able to define new value

propositions for CIOs with tight budgets.

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One area that is emerging as a clear winner is solutions for managing

customer interaction–this goes beyond the traditional reach of sales force

automation and CRM solutions. As customers assume newer roles in creating value

and as they increasingly control product/service relationships, leading

organizations have taken different strategic positions in this evolving

competitive landscape by defining how they create differentiators through their

intellectual assets. These strategies have led to distinct knowledge patterns

that combine organizational and customer knowledge in the most efficient form

for a particular competitive position. Enterprises need to understand these

knowledge patterns and their ‘fit’ before embarking on a journey towards

managing knowledge.

“The real need

is for an analysis of pain points and design of an info-knowledge superstructure

that delivers results at the decision-making levels of the organization” 

Ganesh

Natarajan

In an increasingly competitive environment, this approach of bringing the

best talent and knowledge within the organization as close to the customer as

possible is seen as the best way to maximize profit generation potential for any

business enterprise. Further, to ensure a sustainable competitive edge,

enterprises need to learn to shrink gaps between their suppliers, partners,

alliances and other stakeholders. Integrating competencies across these entities

will result in an extended knowledge enterprise, where collective expertise is

leveraged to achieve exponential value creation.

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It is in the creation of these knowledge-enabled enterprises that the real

revenue and profit potential lies for Indian software firms. In a recent

exercise our firm completed for a Fortune 500 Manufacturer in Asia, we found

that each area of software already implemented, ranging from ERP to CRM to SCM

to e-Learning left large deltas. These could be adequately addressed by

judiciously chosen products and elegantly designed software–areas that were

obviously capable of delivering higher profits and also more satisfaction to the

customer.

How does all this really work? Many organizations today in the Western world

and even in Asia and India have become museums of disparate hardware and

software with systems that barely interface with each other and rarely integrate

in any comprehensive manner. ERP implementations fall short in most forms of

extension to partners — customers, distributors, suppliers and subcontractors.

SFA and CRM efforts tend to be disjointed and poorly integrated with ERP. KM and

e-learning are often independent of core systems, rather than evolutionary with

intelligence fed from and back to bedrock systems.

Does this mean climbing up the value chain or is it just plain common sense?

In a recent KM seminar, the message was clear–commodity software development

will not deliver big bucks for local or offshore vendors. If at all budgets are

available, it is for innovative applications that will put revenue dollars into

the top line and remove cost dollars from the bottomline. Are we ready for the

magic?

The author is deputy chairman and managing director of

Zensar Technologies and the global CEO of Zensar



He can be reached at ganesh@dqindia.com

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