BPO Summit 2007: The Confident BPO

Bangalore

SESSION I
Aman Mustafa, senior VP, Global Services, ACS: "We'll do your mess for less" really doesn't work in licensing. You take over their entire system-hardware, software, people, and technology-everything as part of the transition, and then you go back and start to work with the SAPs, Beatle Softs and Oracles of the world. So you can go back and say-okay, the current licensing doesn't change, but when the renewal comes, we will give a look at the licensing partnership.

Vaibhav Tiwari, president, India Operations, e4e: So, in many ways, you should look at technology in training as an investment rather than an expense and we have seen benefits of that both from technology as well as the process perspective.

Panelists at Session II, Bangalore; Nimish Soni, MD, Cambridge Solutions India; Ravi Raman; KK Raman, executive director, KPMG; M Karuppaswamy, CTO, 24/7 Customer; Rahul Biswari, head-BCP and Info Security, HP BPO

Avinash Vashistha, CEO, Tholons: A good HR system is a technology which makes people's life very easy and in a way that will help you in retention. I think desk procedures and the non-dependency on people, is one thing that we are trying to address as far attrition is concerned.

Nimish Soni, MD, Cambridge Solutions India: I believe we need to focus strongly. It is more about culture than anything else. We have a tendency to know everything, but do we have a tendency to do everything? I think there are specialists for each and I think we need to understand that.

Keynote

TK Kurien, CEO, Wipro BPO: We live in an industry where change is a reality. We all know the buzzwords. But most of us don't recognize the fact that our DNA is hard wired to a certain technology, to a certain way of doing business and that's typically what prevents us from going to the next level. In the first phase, most work that used to come in from customers were low-end work. Suddenly, they moved to the next phase of what I call the 'believing phase' and at that point they suddenly saw quality, far more rationalized business processes, and cost benefits. The third stage we called 'transformation'. And this is where customers would come in and say-"Don't worry what you are going to do for me, tell me how you are going to make an impact with what you are going to do for me in my business". Most of us could figure out that we could disappear off the face of the earth because we are stuck at the second stage. And we are not really doing anything in terms of transforming their fundamental business.

SESSION II
Dheeraj Kaul, product manager, TIEBU: I am a strong believer that there is nothing called the residual risk being zero, there cannot be one. And there are practical problems that we face once in a while with exacting customers who come in and say that everything has to be 100% secure.

Srikiran Raghavan, regional sales head, RSA: The world is changing, so when you speak about security and security implementation, you will have a stable network, stable design but the environment is changing, the nature of data you handle is changing, and the nature of your business is changing. So, as a technology man, you are expected to understand business.

Panel
Rahul Biswari, head of BCP and Info Security, HP BPO: One of the good things that happened with ISO-27001, post BS7799 is that it brought matrices to measure security parameters. Self-assessments, audits are also good indicators of how healthy we are in terms of our control chamber, both internal and external.

Gautam Dua, business manager, Checkpoint Software Technology: Implementing technology for the sake of technology is not going to help. Sometimes, in many cases, we also go speak to the customers and tell them that there is a certain level of residual risk that would be there.

M Karuppaswamy, CTO, 24/7 Customer: With good memory, reading something ten times, I could remember a ten or twelve digit number for a period of more than an hour. So where is the security coming there? How do we prevent this? Basically it is purely a human phenomenon that we are dealing with and that is why it's complicated.

KK Raman, executive director, KPMG: I think technology shouldn't be checked in the first place. We need to keep it going but at the same time I don't think we need to overdo it unless it provides you the day-to-day business or livelihood benefits.