Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp. (Part 14)

By guest author Tony Scott

Outsourcing in a Shifting World Economy

Tony: Back to your point about companies changing, it’s not just about the local companies in India or China doing business in India or China.  It’s about the fact that those companies are going to become global companies, world leaders. If you look at the Global 500 ten years ago, I would venture that about 450 of those were companies in the United States, Japan, or Western Europe. Ten to twenty years from now, we will likely see the majority of Global 500 companies from places other than the United States, Japan, or Western Europe.  That’s a major shift.

Vivek: We are already seeing manifestations of this.

Tony: Absolutely. In China and India there are a number of large companies, and they are starting to buy companies outside of their home markets. So, there is a big change going on in the way companies interact with the Indian and Chinese companies: how they partner with them, and how they sell to them and with them.  It’s not just that Indian outsourcers will provide services to Indian companies. It’s going to be a growing – and global –marketplace.

Vivek: It’s already starting to happen. IBM is doing that, Wipro is doing that, because they recognize that change is happening.  Ten years ago you would have said that the Indian market was competitive but not mature. Now it’s maturing to a point where domestic Indian companies recognize that if they need to have the same level of service that a global company would expect from an Indian outsourcer, they will have to pay the same price to that outsourcer.

Tony: Exactly.

Vivek: Everything is being normalized at a rapid pace. You’re selling to the same customers, selling to the same global consumer; it doesn’t matter where you are. Today Tata is big in India, but I was walking past a hotel near Central Park in New York City, and was a Taj hotel.  Companies are becoming global in their aspirations, and if they are going global they have to deal with the demographics of each place.

Tony: The demographics of the buyers and the sellers will also change. The people you’re doing business with will look much more diverse, but also much more “global.”  They’ll have backgrounds a lot like you do, Vivek. They’ll be global executives: people who come from one country, may have been educated in another, and then may have worked in three or four other countries.  If a company want to do business in this new global environment, it has to understand the new demographics of the global executive and global consumer – and the global workforce.

Vivek: I agree with you, no question about it. I believe it will be an interesting challenge. It’s not going to be without bumps in the road. We used to have a five-year plan, but we reduced it to three and now we are saying we will do a three-year plan but will revisit it after one year.  That is because customer expectations are changing so rapidly, and technology and communications are changing so rapidly.

As to the workforce, in India, the average age of the workforce is twenty-seven, and the question that comes up in all of our CSC “town hall” meetings is: “Why I am being blocked from using Facebook?” So we started an internal social networking platform, and we now have 25,000 people on it.

If you want to keep those people, if you hire those people, you have to keep them motivated – which means you have to adapt your internal systems. And most important, you have to recognize their way of working and interacting. You have to recognize their desires and aspirations.

This segment is part 14 in the series : Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp.
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