The Hindu Business Line : `IT industry lacking in mature processes'

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Chennai Feb. 17 There is opportunity in every obstacle, seems to be the message that Mr N. Chandrashekaran, executive Vice-President, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, wished to convey in a session on `Leadership-to-Dominance.com', at the annual convention of the Madras Management Association.

"Excluding top players, who have mature processes, the IT industry is one of the most inefficient industries. The IT and ITES market as a whole is about $1 trillion. Of this, about $350 billion is outsourced. Both clients, and most systems integrators, do not have mature processes. So they do not operate at maximum efficiency and spend about 60 per cent of the effort in reworking software that has already been written."

In numbers, that works to sixty per cent of the $350 billion or, in effect, $210 billion.

The other aspect Mr Chandrashekaran pointed out, as a challenge for the industry, is the supply of manpower. "About 3.1 million people graduate in India every year. Of this, 5,00,000 are technical graduates and 3,00,000 are post-graduates and PhDs. Our industry, (which is staring at a potential manpower shortage) has the opportunity to rope in a good part of the remaining 2.3 million."

What we need is quality, rigour and consistency of education, he added. But, the challenge to BPO companies seems even more significant. The other speaker at the session, Mr Ananda Mukerji, MD & CEO, ICICI FirstSource Solutions Ltd, said, "We need very basic skills such as the ability to navigate screens on a PC, in addition to basic English language skills. But even with these basic requirements, only 10 per cent of candidates applying for positions in our industry make the grade."

Mr S. Gopalakrishnan, COO, President and Joint Managing Director, Infosys Technologies, the moderator for the session, added that annually, India produces only 100 PhDs in computer science, "which is abysmally low" and an overall number of 6000 PhDs across subjects.

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