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The countdown has begun 10-9-8-7….! November 30, 2008
The countdown for NASSCOM India Leadership Forum, to be held in Mumbai from February 13-15, has begun. This time around, NASSCOM is expecting participation from over 900 companies and 1500 delegate - making it the biggest IT conference to be hosted in the country.
And it is not only the sheer breadth and scale of the Conference that is turning heads and creating excitement and anticipation. It is the content of the show - the keynotes, panel discussions and presentations - delivered by some of the most well known names and faces of the IT-BPO, academic and Government, that is building up the tempo.
The media too has been turning its spotlight on NASSCOM India Leadership Forum, making it a talking point across India and lifting the enthusiasm levels even further. Detailed coverage about the event has already begun to appear in leading national dailies, including the Times of India. Do check out “Business honchos’ huddle at NASSCOM meet”
Meanwhile, we are looking forward to seeing you at NASSCOM 2008 at Mumbai.
Discussion on issue beyond IT-BPO industry February 24, 2008
As with the previous India Leadership Forums, this time around too the emphasis will be on content, though with a slight difference. In tune with the gradually altering profile and flavour of the conference, speakers will address a host of issues, that go beyond the ambit of the IT-BPO industry. Therefore, while you will hear enough and more from the leaders about outsourcing and gaining global competitiveness, the NASSCOM 2008 event will also witness some feisty discussions and debates on topics such as India at 60, Balancing economic growth with social empowerment, and the IT-BPO sector’s emerging role in the economy of the country and the world. Additionally, the spotlight will fall on some of the burning international concerns of the day such as technology and the environment and the greening of IT. The conference will be more broad based this year, encompassing matters related to global business leadership rather than just IT leadership.
NASSCOM Global Leadership Award Winners February 15, 2008
The setting was the spacious Hyatt Ground and the open air atmosphere gave a special aura to the award ceremony.
There were three major awards and fittingly enough, the awards went to three major stalwarts. Unfortunately, none of the winners could be present at the event to accept their awards. Their CIOs did the honors.
Here are the award winners.
The Business Leader Award was won by Mr.Willie Walsh, CEO of British Airways. Willie Walsh is steering British Airways, the world’s largest airline network, covering over 550 global destinations. The airline has been flying to India since the 1920s and has been engaging with leading Indian IT-BPO partners for the last 15 years. Using state-of-the-art IT solutions provided by its internal team and close-knit family of technology providers, BA has been able to reduce the cost of its IT operations; right-size its workforce; revolutionize travel for customers; web-enable its booking; and absorb network, storage and processing increases.
The Business Leader Award was won by Mr.John Chambers, Chairman of Cisco. As leader of Cisco, John Chambers has virtually redefined the way business is done in the Internet age. His focus on technology, innovation and talent development have made him a global business leader. At the same time, Mr. Chambers has been committed to making Cisco a major player in the Indian market. It is his vision and unwavering commitment that we wish to acknowledge and recognize through the NASSCOM Business Leadership Award.
And finally, the Global Indian Award was won by Mr.Ratan Tata. Ratan is a luminary who has brought fame and glory to India and made us all very proud. His vision and leadership across industry–IT, telecom, automotive, steel and hospitality has made India synonymous with innovation and quality. The man behind the company’s biggest recent coup—the cheapest car in the world, the Nano—has virtually put India’s automobile sector on the international map. Being lauded as a path-breaking design innovation, the Nano has captured the imagination of the world.
Three threads: Innovation, the Nano & web 2.0 February 15, 2008
It would’nt be too far off the mark to say that these were the common threads that ran through many sessions. If the speakers at the plenary spoke about the different facets of innovation - be it through gamechanging market play or through a globalised strategy, many speakers - from within and outside India - constantly referred to the Nano. Be it the radical price point (though Anand Mahindra pointed out at the plenary that the car may not actually retail at 100k) or the engineering innovations, suddenly an entire technology industry was looking to a company from the smokestack economy for lessons in strategy!
Other sesssions about customer interaction- be they about deepening customer relationships or transforming enterprises into more customer centric ones, every speaker turned to the new web as a key tool for achieving these objectives.
In the P2P Connect session on web 2.0, the nature of debate clearly reflected a corporate India that is ambiguous to these new technologies. Participants spoke of how companies really wished to “gag” or fire employees who were outspoken; at the other end of the spectrum, the CEO of an online services player, where one employee had posted blogs critical of the content published by his company, often critiquing language and style, said that they reacted by moving the employee to quality control, where he could put his analysis to use! Clearly a mixed bag.
Consensus however on the point that it would be well neigh impossible to regulate this medium - companies were better off adopting transparent and up front communication policies.
The 5 Things That I Did Not Know About Egypt February 14, 2008
Last night’s glitzy Leadership Award ceremony was sponored by Egypt’s equivalent of NASSCOM, the ITIDA (Information Technology Industry Development Agency). I got to pick up one of their booklets where they had outlined the advantages that their country has to offer in the realm of IT. Here are 5 points that caught my fancy.
1) Egypt has one of the World’s lowest telecom costs
2) World Bank has named Egypt as the leading global economic reformer in 2007 driven by tax, customs adn financial sector reforms.
3) Egypt has a unique multilingual English, French, German Italian adn Spanish speaking talent pool, thanks to its geographic proximity to Europe.
4) Egypt is emerging as a key partner location for the Indian outsourcing sector. I was surprised to know that Satyam and Wipro have already set up their facilities there. Multinationals like Unilever, Vodafone, IBM, Microsoft, P&G are already there.
5) Egypt has one of the lowest attrition.
And here I am who kept thinking that all that Egypt has to offer is the Spinx and the pyramids!
Web 2.0 in full swing February 14, 2008
Nasscom India Leadership Forum is in full swing at Mumbai. Both the quality of sessions and that of attendees made for time well spent.
Web 2.0 is one of the hotly discussed topics and everyone is keen to see how these tools apply to their own context. Prayag met with a group representing the Pennsylvania Economic Development Group, one of whom had attended the P2P session at Nasscom on this topic. They were really excited to learn about the potential and applicability of these tools for a variety of businesses. My team and I also chatted with marketing folks of various IT companies, including Satyam, Birlasoft, TCS, Symphony Services and Wipro. I saw that there is a clear evolution in thinking around the role of marketing and some of the interesting initiatives that companies are looking at include- implementing web 2.0 based communities, thought leadership programs that map with true capabilities of the organization as well as what the market values. Overall, marketing is looking for “creative and innovative” themes and programs to make a difference to their business.
Innovation is the other theme that is being discussed with interest. In fact, today we have a P2P session on the globalization of innovation and the growing importance of India and China as innovation springs. If you are interested, do drop in at 11 am to the Networking Lounge.
While on the topic of innovation and web2.0, I learnt about a very interesting product called Brightidea(www.brightidea.com) which is an innovation pipeline management software. I ran into Biswas Nair, a long time associate, whose company Proquest Solutions (www.proquestsolutions.com) markets this product in India. The product combines a number of web2.0 ideas into its SaaS platform to provide companies with a systematic way to manage their innovation initiative. I thought this was a great concept and it is no wonder that progressive companies like Cisco, Honeywell and British Telecom are its customers.
I am really looking forward to more fruitful and interesting sessions and interactions today.
Winners of ‘Innovation in IT Awards’ February 14, 2008
NASSCOM, along with Boston Consulting Group benchmarked the Indian innovation ecosystem with leading innovation ecosystems around the world and selected the top innovators in India. While the winners were announced back on 5th Feb, the India Leadership Forum was the fitting platform to felicitate the worthy winners.
Mr.A.Raja, the Hon’ble Minister for IT and Telecommunications gave away the awards to the winners. Here, he is seen giving the award to Raj Datta and N.Krishna Kumar of Mindtree for excellence in innovation in the field of Knowledge Management.
The list of winners are:
- Comat Technologies (P) Ltd
- Financial Technologies India Ltd
- Mango Technologies Pvt Ltd
- MediaLab Asia
- Mindtree Consulting
- Mistral Solutions Pvt Ltd
- MeritTrac Services Private Limited
- Texas Instruments
Click here to download a word doc that has full information about the winners. Read more about the awards here.
A CIO’s Insight on Building and Managing Strategic Partnerships February 14, 2008
Anthony Abbattista is the Vice-President, technology solutions at AllState Insurance company that outsources a lot of work to India. They deal with multiple partners and from his many years of experience here and earlier at Accenture, offers the following advice to corporates looking at managing partnerships. Here are the four points he highlighted as important at the panel discussion on managing partnerships at the Leadership Forum.
- Whether services or products, strategic partnership requires a culture of commitment.
- Start small and scale fast.
- Choose companies that you feel comfortable working with. Relationship is everything.
- Must be willing to change ourselves and existing practices.
An Unconference on Web 2.0 and Blogging February 13, 2008
It was a refreshing change to see a complete overhaul of the usual conference format. Even if it was just for one session. When Sharad Sharma, CEO of Yahoo R&D, started the session on blogging, he intrigued the audience when he said that there won’t be a speaker. He then proceeded to say that there will be many speakers and promptly pointed his finger to the crowd. He said that the event will follow the Barcamp model where the audience is involved in the flow of the discussion. Everyone has equal right and in-fact encouraged to their points of views.
The success of an unconference likes in the participation of the audience and Sharad made for a great moderator who encouraged the crowd to open up. Understandably, in the beginning, the crowd was a bit reticent and Sharad had to force it across a few folks. That greatly helped break the ice and as the crowd warmed up, there was more points flying across than he could handle…which is always a good sign!
Most of the discussion was on blogging and Sharad started by focusing on internal blogging within an organization. While many agreed that blogging is something that’s important, there were very little corporates in India who embraced it. Amongst the reasons, the most important was the fear of lack of control over what people say. A few corporate examples were discussed and the conclusion was that there should be healthy open culture in the organization and the ability to digest and value critical feedback.
The second reason for internal blogging not taking off was the lack of interest levels amongst the employees in blogging internally. This could be a reflection of the lack of management support. The drive should come from the top and a quick look around shows that the best organizations that embrace internal blogging effectively are the ones where the CEOs or the top management understanding the value of corporate blogging.
There was a discussion if blogging is really that popular in India and is it just a hype? Sharad had a good answer to this. While he agreed that there is an element of hype, blogging will definitely go mainstream and turn out to be an important medium in a couple of years.
An employee from Logica said how the internal blog was very effective when there was a top management change. When a new CEO came on board, there was a lot of questions amongst the rank and file. The CEO, Andy Greene, started a blog to explain his stand and that helped greatly in allaying fears and explaining his vision for the company.
When Sharad pulled the plug after an hour, the crowd was just beginning to warm up and could have gone for a few more hours. The session, in terms of sheer participation, was the best of the event so far.
NASSCOM Chairman’s Wishlist for the IT Ministry February 13, 2008
Lakshmi Narayanan, Chairman of NASSCOM and A.Raja, Minister for IT and Telecommunications shared the dais at the inaugural session of the Leadership Summit. Lakshmi used the opportunity to request the Government to act on few areas that will be a great boost to the Indian industry.
Lakshmi requested the Government to focus more on e-governance projects. When government invests in more e-gov projects, it will infuse direct revenues into the industry while also greatly increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. This will majorly be a boost for small and medium scale enterprises.
Lakshmi requested the Government to continue its on establishing Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in 2 tier and 3 tier cities in India. This will not only encourage bigger companies to reach out to the smaller towns, it will also result in direct employment opportunities for the workforce there.
He also added that the industry has also its share of promises to fulfill. Currently, most of the industry relies on hiring experienced talent and not many take the effort to invest in training. While there are large number of students who graduate every year, they aren’t up-to the mark in terms of employability and talent. It is the industry onus to ensure that this gap is filled and help in creating industry relevant curriculum. In long term, it will greatly benefit the industry, said Lakshmi.
