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Three batsmen and a home run!
The depression of the post dot-com bust coupled with 9/11 is slowly but surely giving way to much more energized and forward looking US economy ahead. Despite a sluggish recovery on the manufacturing front the services, financial, education and pharma markets are looking up.
Indian services have been creating quite a stir in the US with negative publicity on CNN and leading magazines with headlines ranging from “Your job is going to India” to “Another company shifts its operations to India”. Although this might sound bad it really isn’t the case. Most companies have seen what a few months of sluggish markets can do to their bottom lines and are increasingly aware that they not only have to outsource but also have to outsource offshore.
India today is in a sweet-spot as far as providing quality, cost-efficient software and back office services are concerned. But a word of caution- most SME Indian companies are still in the dark as to how fast Russian and Chinese companies are catching up. These companies are speedily offering the same services that we have been doing for years.
To maintain our competitive edge we must move up the value chain. Some of the value-added services that SME software companies can offer are Onsite Subject Matter Experts, Onsite Needs Analysis teams, etc. Most of us have been shying away from committing to such high cost activities because we have a notion that the customer does not want to pay for any onsite component or we are skeptical that the total proposal cost would be too high to be competitive. In fact the trend in the US market is that they do not mind shelling out that extra dollar for having an onsite value-add component as long as it ensures successful , on time and “anxiety free” delivery.
Anxiety-free is the buzz word today. US companies are at their wits end after having to deal with communication, collaboration and project management issues with Indian SME companies.
One of the key factors we always seem to miss out on is that American and Indian companies function in very different management styles. The Americans work in a collaborative style while we still work in the hierarchical style. Due to this management style most decisions in the US are taken by large, geographically dispersed teams and invariably one or more of the team members come up with the question of “how do we know if everything is going well?” or “is there someone we can talk to during our hours when we need some clarification or modification?”.
One argument against that could be that we could have people working here during US daylight hours; but we need to appreciate that we are a knowledge-based industry and we will burn out our staff by attempting to do that. Additionally Americans are very compassionate people and my experience when calling from India has been that they always spend a minute expressing how grateful they are about us calling them in the night. These factors at some level creates a discomfort among our American clients and they would much rather speak to someone based in the US for project related issues.
In fact just last year I used to tell all our US and European clients that there is no need for an onsite component. My spiel was that we need to be conscious about costs and that since we follow ISO and CMM standards there is no need to do so. However the mood this year has changed to one being “anxiety free” and thus necessitating local presence.
Another aspect is most Indian SMEs have a standard pitch which says – Cheaper, Faster and Better! I believe there is a paradigm shift and US companies are looking for other things like – Ease of deployment, Ease of development, Quality of development etc. “Cheaper” is certainly not a key parameter of selection and neither is “Faster”. This clearly demonstrates again that in today’s world cost is not the only factor and this again ties in with the “Anxiety-Free” concept. In summary I sincerely believe Indian SMEs have a great opportunity ahead to ensure their dominance in the US services market provided we are able to quickly and decisively change our selling and project delivery models.
This will be a regular column about an Indian SME’s insight of the American market. Mail your queries to: maximize@businessgyan.com