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Towards A More Mature IT Ecosystem

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Speaking at the launch of the India Research Center of the

Harvard Business School, outgoing president of the university Larry Summers

compared the challenges of running corporations and universities in a very

unique manner. A CEO's job, he said, is to examine the union of all view

points in an organization and support the ones which create most excitement even

if it means going against the wishes of risk-averse nay sayers. A university

president, on the other hand has to take decisions at the intersection point of

many opposing views and choose the middle path. Such a path is not objectionable

to any.

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This is an interesting argument. It focuses on the problems

that many of us today face-Getting bureaucracy ridden academic institutions

and government organizations to contribute their bit to the development of a

good ecosystem for IT and BPO in multiple cities of our country. The industry

has been struggling for the past many months to get a cynical academic community

to take advantage of industry's willingness to participate in curriculum

redesign, faculty development and the establishment of industry supported

technology development centers inside university campuses. But the pace of

change could have been faster if the participants had shown some interest.

Contrast this with China where the transformation of higher education is

progressing at a feverish pace. The Government realizes that only a willing and

capable workforce, in tune with the needs of the world can help fill the newly

minted Software Parks in every province of the country.

And the threat to India's dream of becoming world

software superpower comes not only from the East, but countries such as Poland

also can shake us all out of any remaining complacency. On a recent trip to

Warsaw, the quick awakening of a sleeping Eastern European country of 40 mn took

me by surprise. The Polish Investment Authority is as friendly as the Irish or

the Chinese development agencies. There are incentives ranging from land and

building subsidies to employment incentives. The various Special Economic Zones

in Krakow, Gdansk, Warsaw and Wooch are competing with each other to showcase

their friendliness and university partnership options. And with more and more

Eastern European countries readying to join the EU and offer Schengen visas, the

options for European and even American customers to choose Poland, Russia,

Hungary, Rumania or the Czech Republic for the outsourcing can become very

threatening to India.

Bureaucrats

should be proactive in their resource and infrastructure efforts, rather

than finding shortcuts
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A supportive ecosystem in India can and must be built. They

should be proactive in their resource and infrastructure efforts-rather than

finding some shortcuts they should look at complete solutions. Already the joke

in Pune is that while in UK they drive on the left of the road and in US on the

right of the road, people in the city drive on what's left of the road-a

cynical but true reflection of the sorry state of neglect of the infrastructure

in this and many other wannabe IT cities!

Government must take notice of, is the ease with which

Indian companies, can move to set up large centers in other countries! The poor

infrastructure coupled with the rapidly escalating costs of manpower and other

inputs may well make this a short term reality.

But if Poland and China seem to have what it takes to

become true competitors for India's share of the global outsourcing pie, we

can take some heart from what Strategy Professor Tarun Khanna said at the HBS

inauguration. Explaining that convergence is not really a possibility between

India and China, he reasoned that China has done whatever it takes on the

infrastructure side while India has tapped the entrepreneurial resource creation

side better-The first is a product of government focus and the second a result

of CEO's innovation and entrepreneurship. Neither of these can be built in a

day or even a few years, hence we could still be sitting pretty on top of the

services outsourcing heap at the end of this decade-but only just!

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