India is the (information) centre of the world

Author Tim Lyons Published 12 October 2009

For anyone who has read the book The World is Flat the idea that India is a powerhouse to be reckoned with is no great surprise. Indeed, just picking up the newspaper any day of the week supports that contention.

Similarly, it is not surprising that India – where English is widely spoken and education is highly valued – receives so much of the world's outsourced business processes like customer service, telemarketing and information technology services. What might come as a shock though is just how far India has come as the information hub of the world.

While there are any number of articles and management consultant white papers extolling the virtues of outsourcing and how much it represents both in terms of cost savings, strategic focus, revenue optimisation and so on, it is the companies themselves that best sum up how far the business has come. Global behemoths like Wipro and Infosys represent not only the future of outsourcing, as it has come to be known, but truly the future of global information management.

There are many arguments that surround the effectiveness of outsourcing: what is the different between core and process? Are there truly any savings to be had by outsourcing? While the debate rages, there is one incontrovertible fact: Indian outsourcing companies have invented and reinvented themselves many times and are well placed to face the information needs of the 21st century.

What started as telephone customer service rooms have now bloomed into order management and sourcing, HR process outsourcing, IT support, legal and financial support and a host of other applications. If we dissect just one of these – HR (see attached) – we can see that they have taken the whole HR process and broken it down into such fine detail that customers can pick and choose what aspect of the HR chain they might need assistance with.

Such development raises as many questions as it answers: Can a company really be all things to all people? Where does this leave specialists like HR, accounting and legal firms?

While not easily answered, there is no question that the Indian global information businesses have come a long way from their days as simple telephone outsourcing businesses. Moreover, their size and global reach suggests the expansion of their empires is only just beginning.

http://www.infosys.com/images/BPO-HRO-Offerings.gif accessed Oct 6, 2009