In The Spotlight

Socially Responsible Outsourcing

Data Quest Article, 03/2010, Ganesh Natarajan

There is never a shortage of three letter words coined by the services industry and it was amusing to discover a new one at the Orlando conference of the IAOP – International Association of Outsourcing  Professionals. A full track at the conference had been named SRO – Socially Responsible Outsourcing and it was quite interesting to see the quantum of research and discussion this area is attracting among academicians and practitioners of outsourcing in the US today.

SRO goes beyond the allocation of funds to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which may be adequate for more traditional industry sectors but would not do justice to an industry which prides itself on its influence on so many sectors and geographies. The imperative to enable Education, Healthcare and amenities to the communities in which we live and build our campuses and technology centres has been recognized by most of the significant industry players with the NASSCOM Foundation providing a platform for many smaller companies to contribute to worthy causes. The NASSCOM Knowledge Network initiative which has enabled rural India to access high quality content and skills and the recognition provided even in the recent India Leadership Forum to small companies which have demonstrated that the industry cares demonstrate the willingness of our industry to extend a helping hand to all the underprivileged constituencies around us.

With the specter of protectionism rearing its ugly head now and again as the Western economies struggle to provide jobs for many Americans and Europeans, today, SRO is becoming an imperative too. Our own company’s efforts to educate and empower young black South Africans in Johannesburg, collaborate with the University of Essex in UK and the University of Wollongong in Australia to enable research and best practice sharing for IT entrepreneurship and include our customers in the establishment of children’s education facilities in the cities of Pune and Hyderabad where we operate have been hailed in many quarters. All this and more needs to be done to give back to the societies in which our customers operate and enable their countries to cater to the talent surplus that exists as well as the customer deficit that plagues some of the underserved parts of Africa and Asia even today.

If there is one facet that made the IAOP conference stand out, it was the number of IT and BPO sourcing officials and procurement officers of organisations that came to the conference and mingled with the inevitable raft of providers and advisory firms that were peddling their wares in the presentations and exhibition.The conference tracks which discussed the science and art of outsourcing and presented both customer and provider perspectives on best practices and new ways of outsourcing through cloud computing proved that the industry continues to be vibrant.   The IAOP chapters that are soon starting up in India will enable outsourcing best practices, not just in IT and BPO but also in sectors such as engineering, pharma, healthcare and real estate to be shared across a wider community and provide complementarity to the efforts of NASSCOM in the global market and CII in the local terrain of IT and IT Enabled Services and multiple other industry segments..

Perhaps the most rewarding moment of the IAOP conference for me was the induction of Dewang Mehta into the IAOP Hall of Fame, a singular honour bestowed on just a dozen or so individuals since the inception of IAOP. Michael Corbett, founder of IAOP spoke warmly of Dewang’s contributions to the fledgling industry in its formative years and while receiving the award on behalf of Dewang and NASSCOM, it was my privilege to recount to the three hundred plus audience of American and European sourcing chiefs the early years of NASSCOM and the aplomb and confidence with which Dewang led many of us to believe that we would achieve the Fifty Billion US Dollar Exports goal – a prize which is ours for the taking in 2010. The strength and resilience of NASSCOM today is testimony to the institution building capability of Dewang Mehta and his name will truly be etched in letters of gold in the history wall of the IT and Business Services industry India. His clarion call “Roti Kapda Makan Bijli aur Bandwidth” for the betterment of India’s fortunes is valid today and the search for an inclusive India will  need evangelists of the caliber of Dewang to take the IT agenda forward in the next decade.