I have been wondering about new outsourcing destination in India for quite a long time...And every time I read news, I just read about the same towns again and again...Nothing new...
So ppl might ask how come I arrived at this town...What has this town to offer which will attract companies here...
Well I guess this is more about Rajasthan government to take steps to make it attractive for the investors...The town has all the initial ingredients which are required for any IT town to come up...I think one can easily compare this town to satellite town like Gurgaon...
Few of the interesting points about Bhiwadi...60 Kms from Gurgaon....There is already Nh7 running connecting Gurgaon to Bhiwadi which makes the journey just 40 minutes long from Gurgaon...With Delhi - Gurgaon expressway already up and running, journey time from Delhi to Bhiwadi would be just 1 hour. Gurgaon is getting packed with virtually no space left for expansion. Bhiwadi could be the solutions with readymade infrastructure already in place...Bhiwadi is one of the biggest industrial town in Rajasthan with lots of MNCs already operating out of huge campuses....Lots of industries already have huge base in that town...
Lots of huge empty land readily available for big MNCs to expand...Cheap rentals and good infratructure...
Proximity to lot of good educational institutions....Close to Delhi, Gurgaon, Jaipur and Alwar...This whole belt has more than 20 engineering colleges around...Supply of manpower shouldnt be a problem.
I think if Rajasthan Government can convince few companies to set up base there, it can act like a big thrust which the government was trying to find for a long time...Virtually there is no presence of IT companies in India...
Government should have a look at having a high speed train running from Delhi to Bhiwadi via Gurgaon for long term competitive advantage...GoI has already said that they are going to start an IIT in Rajasthan, that should also help for the long term advantage...Rajasthan also has a good English speaking population with neutral accent...
Overall I think with little push from Rajasthan Government and support from industries, Bhiwadi is a possible next IT outsourcing destination in India...If rajasthan government can get its act together, it shouldnt be a distant dream.
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
Friday, 11 May 2007
Why isnt eBay there in the 'Forces behind Globalization'
I bought this book long time back, almost a year back may be...Just could not find enough time to read this book... May be because I kept on relegating this book to lower priority. Every time, the name of the book came on top of the priority list, I bought a new book which seemed more interesting and exciting...Somehow, Tom's book title did not capture me. Yes you read that right...Am I out of my mind, the book became famous in no time because of its very innovative title and I am saying that I did not like the title...Yes, I had read so much about the title, I was kind of bored and started having this feeling that book may not have much to it apart from the title...
Glad to say, I was proved thoroughly and comprehensively wrong. Hats off to you Thomas Friedman...And if given a chance I would like to talk to you about this whole phenomenon. I would love to know how much time did you devote researching for this book...Seems like years...Truly amazing book which not only tells you different facts and forces behind globalization but knowledge packed book which can tell you about so many things in the world in so less words...It was amazing. There are really so many good things about the book, that u just cant finish writing about them...The book has already got rave reviews from all corners around the world and thats the reason I wont devote my energy doing the same...Instead I am going to talk about things which I did not quite agree with.....
The ten forces behind the 'Flat World'....I think each one of them are really important and indeed in some or the the other way influenced in flattening of the earth...But I think if Tom had to limit himself to just 10 forces, then 'eBay - Global Selling' should have been there...The only force which could have made way for eBay was 'WALMART'. I know walmart is a great company and they did play some role in flattening of the earth but to me this role has been over glorified by Thomas Friedman. I am not saying anything against Walmart. The only thing I am saying is there were bigger factors than Walmart which played a major role in making the level playing field.
I personally think 'eBay' is the one company which played a major role in flattening of the earth and I just cant understand why did Thomas Friedman not mention him in his forces behind the level playing the field. Through eBay along with paypal, all the small players could serve the global markets without establishing costly websites of their own. Smaller players could also serve the global markets now and were not restricted to their local community. I know UPS helped them but eBay is the one which started this. eBay created the need for UPS.
I would love to hear from Tom friedman, why he did not choose 'eBay' in his book as one of the forces behind flat earth. Could somebody give me his email id?
Glad to say, I was proved thoroughly and comprehensively wrong. Hats off to you Thomas Friedman...And if given a chance I would like to talk to you about this whole phenomenon. I would love to know how much time did you devote researching for this book...Seems like years...Truly amazing book which not only tells you different facts and forces behind globalization but knowledge packed book which can tell you about so many things in the world in so less words...It was amazing. There are really so many good things about the book, that u just cant finish writing about them...The book has already got rave reviews from all corners around the world and thats the reason I wont devote my energy doing the same...Instead I am going to talk about things which I did not quite agree with.....
The ten forces behind the 'Flat World'....I think each one of them are really important and indeed in some or the the other way influenced in flattening of the earth...But I think if Tom had to limit himself to just 10 forces, then 'eBay - Global Selling' should have been there...The only force which could have made way for eBay was 'WALMART'. I know walmart is a great company and they did play some role in flattening of the earth but to me this role has been over glorified by Thomas Friedman. I am not saying anything against Walmart. The only thing I am saying is there were bigger factors than Walmart which played a major role in making the level playing field.
I personally think 'eBay' is the one company which played a major role in flattening of the earth and I just cant understand why did Thomas Friedman not mention him in his forces behind the level playing the field. Through eBay along with paypal, all the small players could serve the global markets without establishing costly websites of their own. Smaller players could also serve the global markets now and were not restricted to their local community. I know UPS helped them but eBay is the one which started this. eBay created the need for UPS.
I would love to hear from Tom friedman, why he did not choose 'eBay' in his book as one of the forces behind flat earth. Could somebody give me his email id?
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
First Post continued...
Once the outsourcing contract has been signed and engagement started, most of the clients (organizations) feel satisfied and they think honeymoon period has just started. They can relax and chill out without caring too much about the outsourced processes now...And this is when the reality stirkes.
In this particular post, I m going to mention some of the other difficulties and challenges faced by the organizations after signing the contract. Aftermath of the signatures on the outsourcing contract. :-)
First one - If a process is getting outsourced, then more often than not it involved huge change management. Wow, there you go one more process to follow which might require few more consultants to handle that. But outsourcing does involves moving staff (who are not axed) from one organization to the other. Now this can be very sensitive and difficult.
The second - on the lines of the first one, outsourcing can lead union problems. It can lead to lots of jobs moving to those locations where they can be done best, rationalization of the staff and introduction and better and efficient processes. All these 3 together can lead to lot of jobs getting axed which again is very sensitive, political and overwhelming issue to deal with. Even after signing the deal, lot of time can be lost on dealing with these issues.
The third one - These are disagreements about the type and level of service to be delivered. Even after defining SLAs, it becomes really difficult to classify a real problem into agreed SLA. Increasingly, clients are aware of this problem and hence keep some time aside for just these kind of issues. Sometimes though it involves spending more than was originally envisaged.
The fourth one - Lost of skill, control and infrastructure and this I think is the one which is the most important. Bringing the service back in-house becomes next to impossble. All the key resources would have left the organization by that time. This makes the existing vendor that more indispensable and important. This can lead to deteriorating services from the vendor. Vendor understand the equation and stops making investment in the project and project suffers.
These I think were the some of the challenges faced by the organization when they think of outsourcing a service or a function.
In this particular post, I m going to mention some of the other difficulties and challenges faced by the organizations after signing the contract. Aftermath of the signatures on the outsourcing contract. :-)
First one - If a process is getting outsourced, then more often than not it involved huge change management. Wow, there you go one more process to follow which might require few more consultants to handle that. But outsourcing does involves moving staff (who are not axed) from one organization to the other. Now this can be very sensitive and difficult.
The second - on the lines of the first one, outsourcing can lead union problems. It can lead to lots of jobs moving to those locations where they can be done best, rationalization of the staff and introduction and better and efficient processes. All these 3 together can lead to lot of jobs getting axed which again is very sensitive, political and overwhelming issue to deal with. Even after signing the deal, lot of time can be lost on dealing with these issues.
The third one - These are disagreements about the type and level of service to be delivered. Even after defining SLAs, it becomes really difficult to classify a real problem into agreed SLA. Increasingly, clients are aware of this problem and hence keep some time aside for just these kind of issues. Sometimes though it involves spending more than was originally envisaged.
The fourth one - Lost of skill, control and infrastructure and this I think is the one which is the most important. Bringing the service back in-house becomes next to impossble. All the key resources would have left the organization by that time. This makes the existing vendor that more indispensable and important. This can lead to deteriorating services from the vendor. Vendor understand the equation and stops making investment in the project and project suffers.
These I think were the some of the challenges faced by the organization when they think of outsourcing a service or a function.
First Post
Outsourcing - The first thing which comes to mind is, at least these days, India and cost cutting and how companies around the world are actively seeking Indian outsourcing partners to make use of this phenomena. Obviously there are iinumerable advantages to the whole chapter and nobody can deny that. Or is it...One of the surveys carried out by Accenture stated that though 65% of the clients felt that outsourcing has been successful, 82% of those 65% had no means or metrics to measure that success. I have no idea how they defined success. To me that would be one more post to discuss about that. But today I am going to restrict myself to some of the challenges outsourcing poses. Yes I am going to start my blog with difficulties in outsourcing and not harp on those exotic advantages everybody talks about.
Now when we talk about challenges in the outsourcing, there are 2 different kinds of challenges which any client faces when he thinks of outsourcing some of its functions. First one is selecting the vendor, which trust me more often than not is the most difficult part and then comes problems once outsourcing contract has been signed.
In this particular post I am going to discuss about the principal problems which the clients face when selecting the vendor.
The first one is immense effort, time, energy, resources and cost (there are more, I am just restricting myself to these important ones for now) into the outsourcing procurement process.
Because of the past bad experiences and high rate of failures in the outsourcing contracts, the selection processes that are now being used are rigorous and contract negotiation is fierce. Obviously this is being done not to repeat the past mistakes and incorporate the learnings of the past exercises. The services today which need to be outsourced are well specified, clear performance metrics are identified and then the right partner is selected. I am not saying that clients should not do this. In fact this is the way it should be done. But my only problem is the time it takes to do all this. All of us know sometimes this exercise takes upto 1 or more years which I think is excruciatingly slow and painful.
Second one - Though I have clearly stated that clients take up lot of time identifying the services needed to be outsourced and metrics which they would use to measure the success of it. But think again, time and again, we have seen that thats one of the most difficult aspect and may be thats the reason it takes up lot of time. But the problem still remains. Difficulty in specifying functions and mesuring success of it. I know there are lots of parameters which are considered before a service is outsourced but still there are lots of examples in which after outsourcing services to a vendor, client has eventually got it in house.
Third one - this, after the emergence of Indian players, is diminishing slowly but still very largely prevalent - small number of big suppliers who are allowed to bid for the large contracts. As I said due to Indian players more and more companies these days are actually breaking the contract into multiple small ones, which is creating room for small players as well. But even today particularly for the large contracts, only few very large global companies qualify to bid for the contract. Obviously if the contract is large, then the client wants some sort of security from the suppliers and hence they look at orgainization and financial size and stability for their assurance. The majority of the bidders, because of their small size are excluded (this list includes indian companies as well). The biggest problem with this approach is clients have to deal again with the same players with whom they had problems earlier.
Fourth one - this, again with the emergence of Indian players who are willing to accept work at any cost and conditions, is diminishing - vendors more adept at negotiating outsourcing contracts as this is what their expertise lies in. They do this on daily basis. Close to 10 contracts annually and what about the clients. They might have done this once or twice before. Who is at disadvantageous position? If we leave the Indian players out of the picture, then more often than not, vendors eek out a much better deal for themselves and clients keep thinking vice-versa.
These, I think, are the problems mostly faced by the clients before the outsourcing engagement has been signed. I will write about the problems faced by the clients after the outsourcing engagement in the different post. It should be up in 2-3 days or may be sooner.
Now when we talk about challenges in the outsourcing, there are 2 different kinds of challenges which any client faces when he thinks of outsourcing some of its functions. First one is selecting the vendor, which trust me more often than not is the most difficult part and then comes problems once outsourcing contract has been signed.
In this particular post I am going to discuss about the principal problems which the clients face when selecting the vendor.
The first one is immense effort, time, energy, resources and cost (there are more, I am just restricting myself to these important ones for now) into the outsourcing procurement process.
Because of the past bad experiences and high rate of failures in the outsourcing contracts, the selection processes that are now being used are rigorous and contract negotiation is fierce. Obviously this is being done not to repeat the past mistakes and incorporate the learnings of the past exercises. The services today which need to be outsourced are well specified, clear performance metrics are identified and then the right partner is selected. I am not saying that clients should not do this. In fact this is the way it should be done. But my only problem is the time it takes to do all this. All of us know sometimes this exercise takes upto 1 or more years which I think is excruciatingly slow and painful.
Second one - Though I have clearly stated that clients take up lot of time identifying the services needed to be outsourced and metrics which they would use to measure the success of it. But think again, time and again, we have seen that thats one of the most difficult aspect and may be thats the reason it takes up lot of time. But the problem still remains. Difficulty in specifying functions and mesuring success of it. I know there are lots of parameters which are considered before a service is outsourced but still there are lots of examples in which after outsourcing services to a vendor, client has eventually got it in house.
Third one - this, after the emergence of Indian players, is diminishing slowly but still very largely prevalent - small number of big suppliers who are allowed to bid for the large contracts. As I said due to Indian players more and more companies these days are actually breaking the contract into multiple small ones, which is creating room for small players as well. But even today particularly for the large contracts, only few very large global companies qualify to bid for the contract. Obviously if the contract is large, then the client wants some sort of security from the suppliers and hence they look at orgainization and financial size and stability for their assurance. The majority of the bidders, because of their small size are excluded (this list includes indian companies as well). The biggest problem with this approach is clients have to deal again with the same players with whom they had problems earlier.
Fourth one - this, again with the emergence of Indian players who are willing to accept work at any cost and conditions, is diminishing - vendors more adept at negotiating outsourcing contracts as this is what their expertise lies in. They do this on daily basis. Close to 10 contracts annually and what about the clients. They might have done this once or twice before. Who is at disadvantageous position? If we leave the Indian players out of the picture, then more often than not, vendors eek out a much better deal for themselves and clients keep thinking vice-versa.
These, I think, are the problems mostly faced by the clients before the outsourcing engagement has been signed. I will write about the problems faced by the clients after the outsourcing engagement in the different post. It should be up in 2-3 days or may be sooner.
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