NASSCOM helps youth

How NASSCOM helps youth
Source: http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=53483
NASSCOM Foundation
The Indian IT-BPO industry: Creating widespread economic and social impact
A recent and first of its kind Study on the impact of the IT industry on the Indian economy and society has thrown up very interesting findings. Commissioned by the NASSCOM Foundation and undertaken by Deloitte, the Report proves beyond doubt that the IT-BPO industry’s “for profit” and “not for profit” initiatives have resulted in significant growth and development across the country.
Over 123 member companies of NASSCOM participated in the Study, which attempted to assess and quantify the gains made by India owing to the IT-BPO sector, based on the performance of the industry on myriad parameters. At first glance, the Study shows that:
· The Indian IT-BPO industry has contributed significantly to economic growth in terms of GDP, foreign exchange earnings and employment generation.
· The sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP has been steadily rising, from a share of 1.2 percent in FY98 to 5.2 percent in FY07.
· It has resulted in India achieving export earnings of US$ 40 billion in 2000 and boosting the foreign exchange reserve of the country.
· The sector has resulted in generating direct employment of the order of two million by the end of 2008, making it the largest employer in the organized private sector.
· It has also created a ripple effect on the general economic environment in the national and international economic space.
· The industry has been the trigger for many “firsts” and contributed to unleashing the hitherto untapped entrepreneurial potential of the middle class Indian.
· It has taken Indian excellence to the global market.
At an indirect level, the IT-BPO industry has had the following positive impact on other sectors of the economy:
· Resulted in additional, indirect employment generation, where for every job created in the sector, four are created in the economy.
· Created employment for the hitherto margialized sections of society. Interestingly, nearly 75 percent of those employed are the SSC/HSC or the less educated.
· Led to growth of other sectors of the economy with an output multiplier of almost 2 through its non-wage operating expenses, capital expenditure and consumption spending by professionals.
· The Study shows that US$ 15.85 billion spent by the IT-BPO industry in the domestic economy in FY06 generated an additional output of US$ 15.5 billion.
· Encouraged balanced regional development by gradually spreading business operations to smaller Tier II/III cities.
· Assisted in improving the supply of talent pool and development of physical and social infrastructure, either directly or by spurring the Government to action.
Lending a helping hand to society
As socially responsible organizations, IT-BPO companies have undertaken various initiatives to help the disadvantaged sections of society, including the following:
Developed products and services, that enable betterment of lives and ensure that the benefits of technology percolate to all levels of society
Undertaken various community-based programs focused on the marginalized that span areas such as health, education, rural development, women and children etc.
Helped bridge the digital divide by developing software in the local language to touch larger sections of society
Provided technology assistance to NGOs and undertaken socially relevant community initiatives.
Used technology to improve the quality of life in rural areas.

Creating a buzz around VC funding and entrepreneurship
On a broader front, the IT-BPO industry has helped fuel the growth of PE/VC funding, leading to the creation of the first generation of India-centric VC funds. Other sectors, such as healthcare, manufacturing and financial services have also benefited from this phenomenon as these sectors are now also being able to access this source of funding. While the IT-BPO industry continues to be the favorite sector with the largest share (28 percent) of PE/VC funding, other industries now account for a 72 percent share as compared to 34 percent in 2000.

This trend has also resulted in heightened entrepreneurship activity, which has witnessed a huge jump owing to the IT-BPO industry. While earlier, corporate India was predominantly about large, family-owned businesses, the arrival of the IT-BPO industry, the shift of focus from physical capital to intellectual capital and the advent of PE/VC funding has enabled a large number of first generation entrepreneurs with no wealth, to try their hand at starting new enterprises. The demonstrated success of these entrepreneurs has created an aspiration among the middle class and spurred them to exploit their potential with confidence.

According to information available with the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), 1,905 new units were registered during the period FY01 to FY05, most of which were likely to be set up by first generation entrepreneurs. While many first-generation entrepreneurs became billionaires in the process, the wealth created was not restricted to the founders alone. The practice of the Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP), first embraced by the IT-BPO industry, shared this wealth among employees, thereby creating many salaried millionaires.

Getting India on the quality bandwagon
Adoption of the highest quality standards by Indian IT-BPO organizations Has helped dispel India’s low quality image and raised the bar for other industries. India is now emerging as a Research and Development hub for some of the largest IT-BPO companies in the world, once again demonstrating that it now stands for quality. Today, 30 percent of companies worldwide that have reached Level 5 of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) are Indian IT-BPO firms.

The NASSCOM Foundation: playing its part
The NASSCOM Foundation has taken significant strides in helping promote thepractice of socially relevant initiatives amongst member companies, including the following:
Provided hand holding support and advisory services to small-sized members
Disseminated information on best practices, international benchmarks and monitoring mechanisms
Identified sector-specific investment opportunities
Developed an Award/recognition system for socially relevant community activities
Helped NGOs in the task of capacity building

Emerging as the preferred employer
Besides being the largest employer in the organized private sector, the IT-BPO industry has also become the preferred job destination on account of the fact that it has created employment opportunities in smaller towns/cities; encouraged employment of the differently-abled: opened opportunities for non-technical personnel: promoted women empowerment, built a connect with Indian youth and created opportunities for the “out-of-the-mainstream” candidates.

Expanding India’s talent pool
The Indian IT-BPO industry, in an effort to combat manpower shortfalls, has made massive in-house training investments, to power its growth and become globally competitive. The industry has also gone beyond and collaborated with the government, private educational institutions as well as industry associations to help build capacity and skills.

NASSCOM has been involved in developing standards for training and recruitment at the entry level to make students more employable. The top 5 software companies are investing close to US$ 430 million in FY08 to train around 100,000 engineers hired during this period. Companies on an average conduct 163 training programs annually, with almost 80 percent spent on training entry level hires.

Women in IT
Source: http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/templates/NormalPage.aspx?id=53482
Entering the “Boardroom of the Future”
Women in India matter. For one, they are 50 percent of India’s total population, even though census figures tell us that they constitute only 18 percent of the “organized sector.” In the developed nations of the world, that number would be closer to 50 percent, and certainly it is 50 percent for all white collar jobs. There is a direct correlation between women in employment and the economic well being of a nation. Therefore, at 18 percent, we have our job cut out for us. We have to take the number to where it belongs: 50 percent in our lifetime.

Board Room of the Future
Before I talk about the role of Professional Women and the part they will play in the boardroom of the future, it is important to examine both the issues and possibly bring up some not so palatable truths. First and foremost, Board rooms are de-sexed places. The idea is not to enter a Board room with gender, but rather with intellect and proven capability.

Let us look at the emerging face of the Board room, the Board Room of the Future, and there may be a twist to the tale. I believe that the traditional Board room is ready for a face over. In it, there are eight emerging themes that the Board Members must engage in, in addition to what they do best: protecting the interest of the share holders.

The eight themes defining the Board of the Future
First and foremost, the Board of the Future must be able to take a multi-disciplinary view of the business. In an increasingly global and hyper-competitive world, companies must have an idea of how their products and services impact others and how others impact their business. Gone are the days when accounting meant accounting, marketing meant marketing and production meant just that. While the operating management must have a more disciplined focus, a Board must be capable of creating synthesis.

People who aspire to the Board must therefore have the capacity to build a multi-disciplinary view of things. This requirement goes against the grain of the typical Indian woman professional because she quite often decides to “specialize” in the interest of “work-life balance.”

She often decides that it is better to be a child specialist than a hospital CEO. She thinks, it is better to be a product manager than the sales head and so on. As a result, women professionals opt-out of rotational assignments and resist geographic displacement that is essential in mid-career so that a person develops the insights, the capacity to grasp and question, from a multi-disciplinary point of view.

Building the capacity to understand, question and process
The second emergent feature of the Board Room of the Future is the capacity to understand, and process. While the Board’s job is not to deliver the results, nor to engage with the details of the business, yet it must have, at a higher level, process centricity over result centricity. After all, the results are about the past and there is little one can do for things already done. Therefore, the Board must ensure that the processes in the corporation are right, that management is focused on doing the right things in the right way. If board members themselves do not have affinity to process, they will not be able to question the management on the hows and the whys, leaving its interaction at shallow levels and thereby sometimes assuming even punitive risks under an increasingly vigilant legal system.

Understanding Innovation
The third aspect about the Board of the Future is its capacity to understand innovation. This one is critical from the point of view of long-term competitiveness of the enterprise. While it may be possible for an organization to make short-term progress and profits without innovation, in the long-term, it is dead. In the future, innovation will dominate Board room conversation from another critical angle: risk taking. An intelligent board would mean an innovation centric board for sure.

Sustaining sustainability!
The next theme I am going to talk about is sustainability. It has been on many lips but on few hearts so far. But today, more than ever before, businesses must recognize the interconnectedness of the world within which money must be made. That interconnected world is full of surprises. The role of enterprises must be to de-risk these surprises and deliver consistently. Successful corporations cannot any longer come out with a spectacular product or a service or a market find from a shareholder stand-point as just a flash in the pan. Sustainability is a leadership expectation. It is the core of all strategy. The Board of the Future has to hold the sustainability mirror in front of the management face for every key policy and its implementation and all sustainability begins with inclusion.

Having spoken about sustainability, let me now talk about an emergent concept called “Emotional Infrastructure.” Since the last couple of years, Professor Vijay Govindarajan of the Tuck School (Author of “Ten Rules of Strategic Innovation” and GE’s Professor in Residence for Innovation for 2008) and I have been applying our minds to this new way of looking at the leadership imperative. Our view is that an organization has three layers of infrastructure. At the bottommost is the Physical Infrastructure which is easy to build and easy to replicate, gives you the “table stakes,” but no competitive advantage.
Above it, is what we call the Intellectual Infrastructure which is thought- leadership intensive, takes longer to build and offers competitive advantage, though fleeting. The ultimate defence however, comes with building the Emotional Infrastructure in a corporation. It is the Emotional Infrastructure that creates “memorability.” We believe, in the very near future, people will have to understand Emotional Infrastructure, and begin to monetize “emotional assets.”

Just as the Board of the Future must focus on the Emotional Infrastructure of the enterprise, it also must fully engage with the all-encompassing thought of Governance. It is not just going to be a legal issue with a narrow geographic focus. The principles of governance must be global, the practices must be scalable and the propagation and defence must be cogent and visible to all stake-holders.

In addition to Governance, I believe the Board of the Future would have to lead the charge on issues related to our Environment, in a far more visible and proactive manner. Board Rooms of the future will have to discern and dialogue on what a corporation’s approved product idea, manufacturing practice or the expansion plan, do to the environment.

Finally, there is the issue of the social responsibility of an enterprise. No longer are we operating in isolation. Investors and buyers alike are beginning to ask what the social beliefs of the enterprise are, what does it stand for? As a civil society, we are no longer willing to accept that business has only one Face—that of a money maker. The Board is the representative of the civil society to keep the management honest and the enterprise cognizant of its social purpose.

Women Professionals in India Ready?
Now let me ask a fundamental question: between the two genders, which one has a natural flair for these eight elements? Yes, indeed these eight elements are inherently feminine; they require a nurturing view of the future and ask us to take a long view of time. Suddenly, as if, the corporation, the male bastion of greed, is discovering its feminine side, which alone would make it whole. This sudden turn would naturally make a woman professional very happy but, that does not take away a basic question from being asked: Is she ready? Probably, largely, the answer is “No.” Not today.

There are three hindrances working against her, vis-a-vis the Board of the Future. These are, stereotyping the female professional, personal sense of mid-career guilt and finally, the proverbial glass ceiling. The stereotype relates to the role of gender in a profession. The woman professional is both a victim and a perpetrator of the stereotype. Consider these:
· Women should choose banking as a career over sales
· Women should be teachers (Preferably part-time!)
· Women should not take up transferable jobs
· In their first two jobs after college, women-professionals are just waiting to get married and then get serious about their work
· If the woman-professional marries someone out of town, it is she who must relocate

The moment we succumb to these stereotypes, the conversation on the Board of the Future becomes meaningless. The bottom-line is that the woman professional who wants to go to the top must first refuse to be stereotyped.
A woman-professional must also know that at the top, life is very demanding and very de-sexed. It is not just possible to become an Indra Nooyi, Naina Lal Kidwai, Mallika Sarabhai or a Vasundhara Raje Scindia by trying to juggle work, home, husband, mother-in-law and making pickle.

The truth is, these women are juggling nothing–they are steadfastly committed to their respective professions and are very ambitious individuals who are focused on the goal that demands a price paid at the entrance. These people are professionals first and women next. They are led by their competence and not their gender when they walk into an organization, perform before an audience or run a state.

Now to talk about the personal sense of mid-career guilt. Even the best of women professionals experience this guilt once their children come into the picture and they ask themselves the question, “Am I being a good mother?” I believe, this sense of guilt is pervasive, meaningless and debilitating. The fact of the matter is that today’s children are getting far more than we ever got. Therefore, why the guilt? I believe the Indian middle-class is over focused on its children and this obsession is neither good for the parent nor the child.
Women professionals around the world are far more at peace with their parenting capability than their middle-class, Indian counterparts.

The other part is that to go to the top, whether you are a man or a woman, you must travel a lot, sometimes work weekends, network outside the workplace, learn on your own initiative, engage continuously and finally, give an awful lot more than you get. These have less to do with the organization; they have more to do with your own deep driving desire.

The real and perceived glass ceiling
Many women in modern India have proven that there is indeed a glass ceiling, and also that it can be busted. We have no dearth of role models before us.

The future, someone said, is a brick wall; it is meant to keep out folks who do not seriously want to get beyond it. The opportunities in corporate India are exploding. Therefore, what I’d like to say to the women is please be comfortable with your gender.