Setting Standards In BPO/ITES

It goes to Nasscom’s credit that it organized an important seminar on

quality standards in business process outsourcing (BPO) or IT-enabled services (ITES)

recently in Mumbai. The event speaks for Nasscom’s foresight in helping the

industry to set up standards in BPO/ITES when the economy is at a take-off

stage.

With the global slowdown, BPO/ITES too took a beating. But when economy

begins to pick up again, BPO/ITES is certain to emerge as a huge window of

opportunity next only to software exports.

Gartner, McKinsey and Dataquest, project the global market size of BPO/ITES

between $500 billion and $700 billion by 2004.

However,

there is one thing that can stop India from enjoying a large portion of this pie

and it is the lack of standards. Hence, just the way software organizations

quickly jumped on the quality bandwagon, those catering to BPO/ITES too will

have to look at ways and means to quickly develop process excellence in their

offerings.

Fortunately for providers of BPO/ITES, they can look up to software

organizations when it comes to quality and standards. According to Nasscom,

today, 32 of the 58 firms assessed at SW-CMM Level 5 globally, are Indian. Also,

201 Indian software companies have adopted global quality standards and 64 are

set to achieve this in 2002.

Looking at the global size of the BPO/ITES market, Carnegie Mellon University

(CMU) has taken the initiative of developing a new framework called eServices

Capability Model. The purpose of this model is to enable BPO/ITES providers to

establish processes that help them to develop and improve their capabilities.

Once the model framework has been developed, the certification process cannot

lag far behind. So, CMU has entered the certification fray and claims that its

certification program provides a seal of assurance about a BPO/ITES providers’

capabilities and performance.

Since majority of the BPO/ITES business comes from the US, clients from there

would soon insist on CMU certification since it would give them confidence on

the quality and reduce risk of transacting business with the certified party.

Which means those who are serious about BPO/ITES business, need to apply

their mind on quality and standards on a priority basis. It is critical for

providers of BPO/ITES to quickly ramp up on quality and standards because data

provided by Nasscom says that 75 percent of top 40 IT services companies in the

US consider India as a country to move to.

If these companies do not find the required quality and standards when they

turn to India for outsourcing, they can get their jobs done easily from other

countries. In such a scenario, we will have no one else to blame, but ourselves.

sylvesterl@cmil.com