Dr. Mohamed EL Teriaky M.D
Full Time MBA program
University Of Akron.
India S.A.
July 26, 2012
The first lecture of the day was about security and technology issues in Indian IT by Prof. Anant Pophali, the associate Dean at Xime, who started by talking again about the three types of services which fall in the sector of IT industry in India: the applications (Apps), Business Process outsourcing (BPO) and Infra-structure and technology outsourcing which support the Apps and BPO.
Then he focused on the difference between offshoring versus outsourcing clarifying that Outsourcing refers to an organization contracting work out to a 3rd party, while offshoring refers to getting work done in a different country, usually to leverage cost advantages.
It’s easy to outsource work but not offshore it, but in both cases the security issues remain vital and important and companies must make sure that people in all places are equally qualified and the information are secured and protected. Discussing an example of a bank, the responsibility of security of information lies on the original site, the site of offshoring and outsourcing depend on the ability to provide a maximum protection of the information security can be insured.
As a result of the importance of this issue, a number of important issues became of equal importance in taking the decision of offshoring or outsourcing like risk management, financial and operational risk and finally the legal and regulatory issues.
Then he discussed the NASSCOM or the National Association of Software and Services Companies which is a non-profit organization, consists of a trade association of Indian Information Technology (IT) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry, established in 1988 to facilitate business and trade in software and services and to encourage advancement of research in software technology.
Dr. Pophali focused on some of the security measures that must be adopted when a company wants to send some of its operations overseas and must keep all its stakeholders relieved, examples of those security measures include: Confidentiality of data, availability of data, integrity, continuity and physical security.
As noticed the whole process is about data which both the provider and the sub-provider must adopt various measures to insure the three main aspects to the information: the availability, confidentiality and integrity of it and this is what many companies take care of especially when signing a contract or master service level agreement (MSLA) like Infosys, in Bangalore, and do work in other places but it insures that all different facilities must replicate exactly the same environment and information security policies as the original company, which is called, (BCP), Business Continuity Planning, the responsibility of business to provide and ensure that all places and various locations complies to the same standards.
The Second presentation we had was about “ Trends in infrastructure development in India.” Dr.Rijo, the associate dean at Xime began by defining the infrastructure as the physical framework characterized by natural monopoly, high sunk cost, non-tradability of out-put, non-rivalness in consumption, and possibility of price exclusion. Then he talked about the importance of infrastructure especially for India because the productivity growth is higher in countries with an adequate and efficient supply of infrastructure. It is also an indicator of the presence of high life quality as poverty is linked to poor infrastructure.
By more focusing on Indian infrastructure, Dr. Rijo mentioned that the infrastructure sector accounts for 26.7 % of the Indian industrial output. Then we discussed the aviation, the railroad (India is the third largest railway in the world with 7083 railway station), telecommunication (over all tele-density has reached 78.71 %), roads, etc.
The final presentation was a brief talk about Indian manufacturing industry in which Mr. Naresh Palta, the CEO of Maini Global Aerospace discussed the historic background and the macro-perspective of manufacturing in India and he concluded by some federal and state-level regulatory scenarios affecting manufacturing in India.
Something I would never forget about this day is that , on the lectures they were telling us about the great infrastructure India got, the light went off 5 times in the lecture just as usual and we had no internet that day. I found that very funny and just completed the overall picture we had about india.