Mr. Rajogopal Kishore from Capgemini Financial Services visited us to discuss the Indian IT industry. Mr. Kishore had several years of experience within the IT field, including working at Infosys. He briefed us on the timeline of the IT industry in India, which began in the 1980’s. During this time, India was in a major budget deficit and needed to seek out a way to propel its economy. Indians traveled to America offering programming services to companies, for a fraction of the price they were paying in-house. The Indians made improvements to the software and began to offer maintenance, enhancement, and creation of new software. They then began to offer many more technological services like design of software, development requirements, architecture, and customer support. Now, Indian IT companies take care of the entire back office maintenance for American companies. In 2002, India started consulting and researching and looking into other countries to do IT services for, which led to a clash of cultures. Presently, a lot of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and outsourcing of call centers is actually done in Manila, Philippines because they speak much better English and have knowledge of the IT industry. India is then able to focus on Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) instead. Another point he made is that the IT industry will start to flat line in the future, rather than incline due to employees staying longer within the company.
Mr. Kishore also spoke of clouds and the IT sector. Company applications can be put onto a cloud and can be run from anywhere, and the company can also more easily and efficiently host their CRM applications in the cloud. He states that clouds will positively affect the industry and that some government regulation is needed to help with security and privacy issues. However, he remains that creative destruction is needed to bring about change in the right direction.
Some advice that Mr. Kishore gave us as international students traveling back the United States is that we as a generation should fully embrace collaborating with India. India greatly looks up to America and sees us as positive, energetic, and innovative, but we do not embrace them as freely. Our job is to learn how to do business better with India and to bring about understanding of their business styles. For instance, they are generally afraid to express themselves because they do not disagree with their elders, therefore we need to be clear about what we want them to do and the deadlines we want them to meet. If they express any doubt, we need to find a way for them to realistically meet deadlines, rather than them telling us they can and then approaching us on the day it is due and telling us they can’t. We also need to communicate well with them, over communicate actually, and have sessions to discuss how integral their job is to American business. We should also praise their good work and make them feel like they are worthwhile, because then collaboration in the future between the two nations can be an even more grand thing.