ITES is not IT

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acking on the reputation of Indian geeks for high quality and realtively inexpensive software skills, India with its skilled English speaking and IT savvy generation X is now emerging as an attractive back office destination to some of the world's biggest corporations. The IT enabled services sector in India is expected to record phenomenal growth and will reap $20 billion by 2008, according to a recent Nasscom report. The apex industry body based its bullish forecast on a 70 per cent surge in the $1.5-billion sector in the past year to March. Global majors such as Dell, General Electric and Siemens are among the many global players who have already shifted call centre facilities to India. Hard hit by falling margins on account of slowdown, software majors such as Infosys, Wipro, Hughes Software, Satyam Computers and HCL Tech have also announced their decision to foray into the sector.

So far the sector has generated 100,000 jobs and the trend is expected to continue in the coming years. While the employment potential is humongous, one needs to remember that with the exception of the first two letters ITES is remotely connected with IT. ITES does not fall in the ambit of traditional software or hardware development, testing and maintainence. To equate the two and celebrate the upsurge in ITES as an indicator of IT recovery would be erroneous and misplaced. Rather the foray by IT majors into the BPO sector is a sign of desperation born out of a need to rev up revenues in the face of sharply falling margins from IT investments. Simply put ITES is the delegation of one or more IT intensive operations (Example of IT intensive operation Foodworld chains using computers for billing) to an external provider, who in turns administers and manages the selected business process based upon defined and measurable perfomance metrics. These outsourced operations cover an entire spectrum of remotely managed activities which are business critical but not essentially core operations of the organisation. These include services such as call centers, finance and accounting services, HR services such as managing payrolls, staffing, data search integration and management, networking services management and web services. An a time when Indian software companies, especially SMES need to effectively market IT services and build brand equity, why is Nasscom conducting studies and promoting services like payroll processing is a question that can be answered only by the apex industry body?

By doing so, Nasscom is gradually becoming a body representing trendy English graduates rather than Indian techies, as ITES is a sector that precisely hires the former. A booming ITES market will provide job opportunities to young 20 year old graduates who have majored in Humanities and Social Science or opted for a plain science degree not to an engineering graduate unless the work is related to network management or web services. India's high quality low-cost coders are being shortcharged by a blurring of lines between ITES and IT. To contradict please prove how telemarketing, helpdesk support, medical transcription, back-office accounting, payroll management, maintaining legal databases, insurance claim and credit-card processing all of which, are delivered over phone, computer and the internet - are traditional IT functions.

The remote processing industry is labour intensive and is needed in a country like India where hundreds of graduates land low paid jobs remain unemployed. But when one speaks of an uptick in the job market, we need to realise ITES is not IT. Period.

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