Sustaining the competitive edge in offshoring

B Ashok, senior vice president, IT Services, Cisco Systems India Pvt. Ltd, outlines some solutions to the forthcoming manpowershortage, to help India maintain its offshoring leadership.

Over the last decade, the Indian ITS sector, comprising IT/ ITeS companies, has emerged as an engine for economic growth, capitalising on the global offshoring opportunity. A recent NASSCOM-McKinsey report suggests that $110 billion of the total addressable market for global offshoring will be off-shored by 2010. India has the potential to capture over 50 per cent of this market, by growing at 25 per cent year-on-year till 2010.

However, the report clearly states that achieving this growth is not easy. From security and compliance issues, to high attrition and shortage of skilled manpower, Indian ITS companies face several challenges that could hinder growth. In addition, these companies need to drive productivity to stay globally competitive.

Security concerns

• Compliance: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule (HIPAA), Data Protection Act and other sweeping regulatory changes pose unique challenges to the way data and security challenges are handled by ITS companies.
  
• Privacy: Enterprises are constantly handling the data and information of their clients'' customers. This information should be used only for purposes authorised by the owner or supplier and not shared with unauthorised personnel.
  
• Data protection: The outsourcing phenomenon has heightened the concern for protection of sensitive information. Stringent data protection laws in the EU and USA requite service providers devise similarly stringent policies to prevent data misuse.

Urban infrastructure
Indian cities are learning to manage the growth pains – high real estate costs, traffic congestion, among others. Alternate officing strategies may help companies manage these issues to an extent.

Attrition and manpower shortage
NASSCOM estimates India will need a 2.3-million strong ITS workforce by 2010 to maintain its current share in the offshoring market. Supply projections indicate a potential shortfall of nearly 0.5 million qualified employees, nearly 70 per cent of this would be concentrated in the ITeS industry (all of these numbers are for ITS).

In addition, attrition has plagued the sector – analysts say attrition rates vary by 20 per cent to 40 per cent. The industry should look beyond the traditional areas of recruitment. This would however require companies to address employee concerns about work-life balance and flexibility.

These issues can be addressed — trends such as the increased adoption of collaborative technologies, integrated security strategies, telecommuting and mobile working suggest companies are exploring alternate approaches to overcome these challenges. This article explores the role of IP communications; network security and wireless in enabling companies sustain their competitive advantage as the offshoring opportunity grows.

Collaborative IP communications
Collaborative communications solutions offer a comprehensive suite of applications including IP telephony, unified communications, rich-media conferencing, and contact center solutions that facilitate efficient and effective interaction between employees, customers, and vendor partners. These IP-based solutions dramatically improve operational efficiencies, helping to increase organisational productivity, customer satisfaction and cost savings.

IP Communications redefine the traditional call-centre, developing more versatile contact centres with additional capabilities. At present, there is a tendency to think of call centres as voice communication centres. This seriously undervalues the complexity of the service.

The vision is for a new IP-based strategy to redefine how ITS companies run their call centre operations. The emerging opportunities for consideration are:

• The virtualisation of call centre activity – digitisation of all types of media and communications – to offer geographic and device independence.
  
• Call centres are becoming networked contact centres offering a cost effective national single point of contact, 24 by 7 with inbound and outbound capability often involving multimedia.
  
• Each enterprise articulating a converged IP infrastructure strategy.
  

IP communications allow location independence — a housewife employed as a customer service agent could answer technical support calls over an IP-based system, from her residence as agents are no longer limited by the contact centre location but can log-on anywhere on the IP network.

IP makes it easier to integrate business applications and databases to put information at a customer service associates'' fingertips and make them more productive. This would in turn encourage employees to telecommute, ensure flexible work timings, and address the all-important manpower issues – attrition and shortage of skilled personnel. Telecommuting would further prove beneficial in alleviating infrastructure concerns – traffic congestion and real estate overheads.

Integrated network security
Given the severity and potential threat of security challenges faced by ITS companies today, an integrated security strategy, where the networks will identify threats, react appropriately to the severity level, isolate infected servers and desktops and reconfigure themselves in response to an attack, thus defending themselves.

With a vast majority of companies using the Internet to extend their networks to new campuses, telecommuters, mobile workers, customers and partners, privacy and integrity of information is paramount. Companies must secure communications, and ensure that information transported across an internal wired and wireless infrastructure remains confidential. Virtual Private Networks can address the need for secure connectivity.

Network security must also protect an organization from threats, both known and unknown, such as access breaches, "Day Zero"-worm attacks and viruses, and internal threats, which cause the most damage.

Security management is also riding high on the agenda of chief security officers and security administrators. ITS companies are now required to manage heterogenous security components in the network, whilst complying with their own security policies, their customer''s policy, security standards as well as regulations.

Finally, ''trust'' and ''identity'' management solutions help businesses effectively manage who and what can access the network, as well as when, where, and how that access can occur. Deploying a complete identity management solution lets enterprises secure network access and admission at any point in the network, while isolating and controlling infected devices that attempt to access the network. Organisations can streamline the security management of remote network devices, wireless devices, while taking full advantage of existing security and network investments.

Enhanced productivity - wireless networks
Professionals in the ITS sector collaborate frequently — with team members offshore or onsite, clients and partners. Secure wireless local area networks, combined with the benefits of IP communications can add additional minutes or hours each day, adding productivity gains.

Extending network access to mobile employees who are at work affords the following organisational advantages:

• Improved collaboration and responsiveness to customers and coworkers
  
• Enhanced employee productivity
  
• Business resilience by providing alternative connections to corporate resources
  
• Better utilisation of existing technology investments (laptops, the data and voice network, applications)
  
• More efficient use of office space
  
• Reduced errors (by replacing paper with wireless output)
  
• Lower support and maintenance costs

The benefit of mobility equates to millions of dollars more each year in profits due to increased productivity and business efficiency. Installing a secure wireless LAN in ITS companies extends an employee''s desktop around the corporate campus, network security combined with a fast Internet connection can keep knowledge workers productive and communicating when at home.

Telecommuting is now possible; companies do not necessarily "lose" a worker who wants flexible work hours. IP communications, combined with wireless LAN can also help employees remain productive as they move around the office premises should be deleted as this feature is not far away, it is available in today''s Unified communication. So it should ideally be included as a feature on the latest unified communications.