This is an exclusive article series conducted by the Editor Team of CIO News with Satish Janardhanan, Regional CIO – Asia Pacific & Middle East at ManpowerGroup.
The last 4 decades have been a rollercoaster ride for information technology, especially its use in day-to-day corporate life. Until the 80s was an era where technology in the corporate space was largely referred to as Electronic Data Processing [EDP] and the programmer was at the center of this exclusive [and reclusive] ecosystem. Business leaders often depended on monthly or even less frequent updates regarding various business parameters such as production output, sales, revenue, outstandings, and financial metrics.
The advent of personal computers changed all of that. The initial Sinclair, the Apple, the IBM PC XT, AT, the Mac, and other desktop-based user-friendly gadgets soon invaded the workplace and commoditized technology, bringing the erstwhile EDP out into the general office space. Business executives were suddenly able to compute for themselves, and user-led computing took shape across the corporate world. In parallel, various user-friendly software products were born, and VisiCalc, SuperCalc, and a few others evolved, ultimately making space for the now ubiquitous Excel. WordStar gave way to MS Word, and the business computing space continued to change rapidly.
The 90s saw the internet become more easily available to the retail/individual user, and those of us whose careers flourished then will remember the post office protocol [PoP3] accounts, which were the prized possession of a select few back then. India witnessed the telecom revolution from a long-distance connectivity perspective around then, and that laid the foundation of what was to be the single largest growth industry—IT offshoring in the following decade. Global brands, early movers in the offshoring space, started setting up offshore units, then referred to ‘captives’ either via Indian IT service providers or by themselves as legal entities in the Indian market to benefit from the cost arbitrage and the time zone advantage, as well as the easy availability of rudimentary IT skills at scale. The explosive growth phase had begun!
The decade of the ‘00s saw explosive growth in the Indian ITES space, led largely by US and EU-based clients who moved routine technology and operations tasks offshore and benefitted from standardized, reliable service delivery at an attractive price point. The industry evolved, bringing incremental efficiency and the benefits of scale, thus making several routine operational functions much more efficient than when they were fragmented in the respective local markets at origin. A compelling service proposition had emerged, and fuelled by insatiable demand, the industry took root, with similar ventures being established and managed in other Asian and Latin American locations leading up to the ‘follow the sun’ operating model, thus delivering an ‘always on’ experience for the end customer in their home markets.
The decade of the ‘10s saw impressive evolution, with higher-value work being entrusted to offshore partners. Innovation led the way, and process automation underpinned by application engineering enabled whole swathes of business functions such as accounting, procure to pay, balance sheet management, regulatory filing, and cash flow projections to get added to hitherto routine services such as customer service, outbound sales, and collections, as well as routine correspondence automated, standardized, and delivered at scale. The KPO industry had taken root, and businesses as diverse as legal, advertising, drug discovery, and testing started being managed remotely with collaborative leadership inputs and a ‘joined up’ delivery model, progressively harvesting the efficiencies at an impressive pace. Cloud first, mobile first, Bitcoin & crypto had already become a rage!
The first half of the ‘20s is behind us. The pace of change is undiminished. Innovation, product design, customer experience at scale, eCommerce platforms, logistics and supply chain, digital identity creation and verification, national identity registers—all of these enabled by the smooth underlying data and analytics have sprung to life and become successful delivery models, further fuelling the technology-led growth of the ITES sector. Data privacy and related regulation, which at one point threatened the very basis of the fledgling industry, have been addressed effectively by having the ITES model replicated and often managed remotely across Eastern Europe, south and east Asia, as well as Latin America, thus addressing the data sovereignty and allied concerns.
The advent of cloud solutions at scale prior to the turn of the previous decade has further fuelled the trend of converting legacy Capex IT investments in global corporations into manageable Opex with unprecedented flexibility and scalability on demand. All along the journey, skills have struggled to keep pace, and India as a market has responded with agility, making skills at scale available as if on tap! IT security has emerged as a big growth area. In the last few years alone, several global corporations have benefitted from ‘outcome-based’ always on threat monitoring and incident response services, which would have been very difficult and prohibitively expensive in their home markets. AI has swamped the discussion forums now and seems to be leading the next wave of successful growth for the ITES industry.
Those of us who remember the 8.5″ floppy diskette from 3M, Amkette & Dyson, and witnessed storage solutions shrink to the 5.25” inch version and then to the 3.5” rigid diskette and thereafter to the CD/DVD, the high-density mechanical HDDs, and to the SSDs thereafter and now to the ‘on demand’ cloud storage certainly have a few stories to narrate by the fireside. The punched card with the Hollerith code has given way to lowCode/NoCode, and yet the IT worker toils on seamlessly blending the tech solutions of tomorrow to the most optimal outcomes for business challenges today. The industry marches on…
About Satish Janardhanan
Satish J., CIO APME, with an American multinational, is a tenured business and technology leader with credible results in the financial services technology space. With roles in global banking and technology consulting companies, he has led teams developing and supporting solutions for banking & finance, telecoms, retail, and healthcare majors across the USA, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, pioneering offshoring and right-sizing solutions for clients of eminence. He has led Application Security as a business vertical and led significant migrations to the cloud, eliminating legacy technology debt and assisting clients to harvest the ’native’ benefits of the cloud paradigm.
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