Cover Your Ass or Kick Ass

When you work in a Consulting Environment, you are always challenged to perform. And mostly when you work being a client contact person, its more critical. To survive and grow in this environment, all you need to do is -- follow the following principle.

Cover Your Base (CYB) or Cover Your Ass (CYA)

This theory says, whatever you do never leave anything patchy. Never go wrong. Forget about performance but be stable and perfect.

But again, can you grow if you just keep following this? If you just think or care your ass, how will you work to solve the greater business problems. Serious issue huh!!

Well. Don't worry, there's a solution too. Follow the new principle -- Kick Ass.

Forget about your ass (leave it open), and go on kicking others ass. And all you need to do to follow this principle is to remember its two postulates.

1. Life's purpose is to kick as many asses as possible.

2. The world is full of asses.

Fair Enough!!

KPO Industry in India

India is well known as a business process outsourcing hub. It has been leading the side for quite some time now and Bangalore, the software capital of India, went so far that people losing jobs by work being outsourced are called Bangalored. It is a mix of many different factors that made this happen - cheap, diligent and highly skilled workforce, investor friendly policies of Indian Government, Hospitable People and cheap real estate.

Now the same is being replicated in Knowledge Process Outsourcing industry. Indians are young, qualified, intelligent and hard-working but they are no longer so cheap. Neither the people nor the real estate is so cheap as compared to 5 years ago. This has made the resource intensive industry unfavorable giving way for KPO industry.

KPO jobs are better paid and as such they are high IQ too. KPO works can be categorized to two segments:

1. Decision Management or Vertical Solutions or Analytics

This is the area where companies like Global Analytics, Marketics, Fair Isaac, Fractal Analytics etc work. This generally covers areas like Market Segmentation, Predictive Analysis, Sales or Revenue Forecasting and are most common in Banking and Retail Industry.

The Decision Management industry is all set to become really big with many events happening. Some of the interesting events are -

- Inductis got acquired by EXL.

- Marketics was acquired by WNS.

- Fractal broke into two parts, and break away fraction has joined Adventity to start Adventity Analytics Consulting Team.

- Many new entrants have come up like Marketelligent, FifthC, Nettpositive, AbsoluteData etc.

2. MIS Reporting

EvalueServe, Adventity, Inductis etc are major players till now. But this area is a high growth area and many other players have entered this area. The potential of this area is because -

- without good MIS in place, there is little scope for Analytics.

- most of the indian companies are still in the phase building good MIS.

- MIS brings volume to the business.

KPO industry also include company’s own divisions for Business Intelligence. These are generally off-shored or near-shored or in-house. These do almost the same thing as the outsourcing companies do and generally have teams like:

- Analysis

- Business Consulting

- Modeling and Scoring

- Data Management

- Reporting

These teams have difference in functionality but the expertise requirement remains the same. It is very hard for one to master one area without the knowledge of other.

Mostly Banks have very strong internal analytics team while it still lacks in other industry verticals. The Retail biggies and the Telecom giants are now slowing moving towards having Analytics setup.

In Banking, ICICI, HDFC, Citi Bank, Standard Chartered, Barclays, HSBC etc have strong analytics team in India serving their operations globally. ICICI has centers in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai, HSBC in Bangalore and Kolkata, and Citi Bank has centers in Chennai and Bangalore. These are the players having huge operations teams spread across various locations while others have one center each. Standard Chartered has in Bangalore and Barclays in Mumbai. The newest entrant among them is Barclays which has started analytics operations this year only.

While the India has huge potential of being a KPO hub, the problem is with the talent availability. There are few good universities which produces statistics graduates in the likes ISI, Presidency College, Delhi University, IGIDR etc. This has created huge vaccum for other graduates to move into this area and therefore like any other industries KPO is also dominated by the Engineers. Recent trend shows Engineers from IITs and NITs prefer to take an Analytics job than a Software job. This has given a boost to the overall KPO and Analytics Industry for now but this may be difficult to be taken as long term solution.

Overall future of KPO industry looks good but this can only happen if the short comings are addressed. Lets see how it goes further. If India becomes a KPO hub in line with BPO then India is going to be clear leader in overall ITes. I wont deny even overcoming United States.

(Originally published in Global Thougtz)

Analytics : Consulting, In-House or Outsourcing

Anunay has currently written an article in American Banker about Analytics Outsourcing (sorry, it need login, so I am not able to provide the link for the article). The article is titled "Catching the new wave of Globalization".

He has strongly put his points towards the need of Analytics outsourcing in the lines of other operations. I think, I agree with him completely.

There is a Business Process Metamorphosis. Every process start with a innovation by a specialized process solution vendor and it uses its expertise to serve prospective clients through Consulting route. When this process becomes a basic necessity of the clients some see an opportunity to open in-house division for it. But as the department grows and the cost involving to maintain in terms of both tangible and intangible assets becomes huge, some leaders think forward and outsource it. Then a new industry is formally born for the process which is different from the early movers. These new players are not only looking to prove some innovation but they look seriously to establish themselves as a potential process partner. They add tremendous value to their clients. And the party who adopts this for the first time will run much ahead of its competitors. And they deserve it.

I remember one example of Airtel India. Most of the network management and IT Management for Telecom industry was done in-house in India following similar rules in other developing countries. But Airtel came forward and outsourced both welcoming criticisms from all over. IT management was outsourced to IBM while Network Management to Juniper, Ericson and others. This gave Airtel board time to focus on other major priorities like expansion of retail outlets and focusing on customer service. The reward was awesome. Airtel jumped above the state-subsidized BSNL to become the country's largest Telecoms Company.

Now, similar changes are very look awaited in Analytics. Some of the US banks are off-shoring it by opening their captive off-shore centers for cost cutting. And they are gaining a lot. Citi is doing Analytics work mainly in India, Mumbai and Bangalore. The similar trend is being followed by various other banks.

But one point is missed. They are off-shoring but not outsourcing. It may be due to lack of good Analytics Outsourcing Vendors or the lack of interest by the parties to outsource due to the data sensitivity. What ever may be the reason, this is something that is coming in near future. The one who moves early will be highly rewarded.