As Global Capability Centers (GCC) are increasingly becoming popular in India, their rising demand for mid-level management personnel is drawing a lot of senior technical leaders and managers from Indian IT services companies towards them. While the companies that have had their back-offices in India have always known how to operate here, a lot of first-timers struggle to figure it out, and end up offshoring mundane low-risk low-impact jobs.
Over the past couple of decades, Indian IT companies have gradually spun internally into whirlpools of their own making. First, a large aged workforce accumulated in all of them, sitting in cabins, passionately claiming to lead with ruthless eye on efficiency, while at the same time denying their own redundancy in the scheme of things, besides their contribution to a crazy overhead which the industry didn't need during it's glorious years.
Second, most Indian pure play IT service providers failed to move up in the IT value chain. Our stories couldn't move beyond resolving tickets more efficiently through automation, process optimization and shift-left-right-center-whatever. Some industry-flavor helps. We must of course sprinkle some AI these days. We can also implement. But it's largely about resources - that's people.
We learnt how to tell stories - art of story-telling they call it - showcasing past experience, painting scenarios, promising outcomes that would excite customers - we excelled at fluff! But we still don't know how to make and sell stuff that a lot customers would want to buy. Ironically, though, we are good at building the same stuff for western tech giants if they hire us.
In spite of having the largest tech talent in the world, we lacked sufficient depth to have done much by ourselves in AI or any of the recent tech innovations. Even as users of AI, as of social media, our outcomes are mediocre. I agree that we do lack the level of capital rich countries can afford to pump, but it's not always that.
At the core, at least in the IT industry, we have developed a strong service-provider mindset. It's this same mind-set which is probably creeping into GCC's. Most project managers and technical leaders in the new GCC's in India see their colleagues from US or UK or elsewhere as clients without calling them so. This mindset is not healthy for the success of any GCC, as it should not just end up being an offshoring arrangement, but must emerge as a strategic and genuinely value-adding center for a company, where value is beyond cost reduction and tapping of skilled resources.
Offshoring some of IT without outsourcing it has become a compelling option for a lot of large companies in the west, especially as Indian IT firms have become huge and expensive masses of inefficiency. But for GCC's to integrate into parent companies as strategic centers of excellence, their leaders must come out of service-provider mindset ingrained into them from their IT services experience and become assertive partners. (Also, the parent companies need to treat them as their own, and equals, which is another topic worth exploring.)
At the same time, the next generation entering the tech sector must unlearn the 'customer is always right' lessons and ingrain creativity and problem-solving skills to truly build what solves customer problems.
I must admit my experience is limited, samples are small and I may have made too broad and sweeping generalizations some of which may only be partially true. I would like others to share and help us get better perspective of what's up, what's down, what's to be, and how.
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