Virtual Reality In Software Services

Multi-shift BPOs and working from home is a trend, which may soon

be seen in India

An

interesting question came up at the recent TiE Conference in Delhi where a group

of us addressed the issue of entrepreneurial opportunities and challenges in the

IT Industry. With the trend moving towards home working and usage of high

bandwidth Internet to connect project team members across locations, are there a

whole new set of Human Resource challenges that industry CEOs will have to

contend with?

Addressing the issue,

Hema Ravichandran of Infosys fame very correctly said that the real challenges

of Virtual Delivery Centers would be that managers would have to learn to manage

outcomes rather than processes- how true in a world where managerial

capability itself is suspect and many projects suffer not on account of lack of

talent but lack of ability to get the team to work together towards a common

goal. And while the concept of home working and the usage of multi-location

teams is a great way to overcome the issues of terrible infrastructure and high

investments of building more and fancy software campuses, CEOs and HR chiefs

will have to carefully think through the new management challenges that

distributed work will definitely throw up.

The potential of the

Virtual Delivery Center model is so great that it will definitely overcome these

hurdles and become the de facto standard for software development in the years

to come. Vijay Saradhi who heads Zensar's new facility in Hyderabad, which

will showcase our company's first Virtual Global Development Center talks

excitedly about harnessing the best talent in Kakinada, Vizag, Guntur etc with

people working from small centers connected to a hub in Hyderabad for creating

innovative designs, all of which can be converted to programs at a fully

automated central Java and Dot Net code generation facility. And the true power

of the model will begin to be exploited when technical architects in Estonia,

Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, and Shenzhen provide their skills to the Indian

architecting hubs and clients all over the world are able to use an Internet

screen to feed their business problems to a large faceless developer community

all over the world-a true revolution!

There are many more

innovations coming through in IT and BPO, with the possibilities of KPO in

equity research, legal work, remote management of learning and other higher end

activities having the potential to transform the perception and reality of BPO

from India. And the opportunities for entrepreneurs in each of these areas are

immense. All it needs is a well-chosen niche with a defensible and unique value

proposition that can serve a manifest or latent need of the customer.

The old debate, of

course, continues and was played out again at the TiE panel-will India ever

develop great products or is the services focus adequate? The truth is that even

the success in services-IT and BPO will be sustainable only if new frameworks

and engagement and delivery models are developed to keep the country ahead of

competitors such as China, Vietnam, and many of the Eastern European, and Latin

American countries who have the quality if not the quantity of manpower to

complete. And as the Nasscom-McKinsey report rightly points out the $60 bn

export goal for 2010 can be exceeded if the innovative capabilities of the

Indian entrepreneur are properly channelized into discovering a new wave of

growth for the industry, something that has been pointed out in this column for

two years!

Finally, back to the human impact of distributed working;

and the social impact cannot be overlooked either. Will society accept the

regular night worker and the stay at home professional without eyebrows being

raised? It will be interesting to see how that scenario plays out!