At a time of financial uncertainty when Wall Street came crushing and the market downturn showed its global impact, the rising value of dollar entail some good offing for Indian Business Process Outsourcing industry. It was keeping in mind these unpredictable events and in order to streamline the processes of BPO industry, a day-long seminar on 'Knowledge Management in the BPO Space: Opportunities & Challenges' was organised here in Gurgaon on Wednesday.
The conference, which was attended by doyens of BPO industry, was organised by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Business Process Industry Association of India (BPIAI). One of the major highlights of the conference was the announcement of a number of tax rebate and incentives by the Fiji Islands Trade & Investment Bureau (FTIB), Govt of Fiji, to the Indian BPO industry opening their shops in the Island nation.
Inviting Indian BPO industry to Fiji, Francis Narayanan of FTIB said that his country enjoys a strategic advantage by its proximity to New Zealand and Australia, the time zone factor, English speaking population with literacy rate as high as 93%.
"The Govt of Fiji has approved two temporary studio city zones and has demarcated Kalabo Tax Free Zone to ICT Economic Development Zone with a 10-year tax exemption to attract ICT investment. The Govt is also planning to come out with e-commerce bill to protect online transaction," Narayanan said.
The conference also highlighted the Indian BPO evolution from nascent days to modern-day IT and knowledge driven services. The 2007-2008 survey of the Indian software & service sector recorded an overall growth of 28%. It is expected that the BPO industry will touch $50 billion mark revenue, growing at the modest 24%.
Tarun Satiya of Ernst & Young highlighted the strategic imperative of knowledge management and the need for building intellectual capital. He said that globalisation has accelerated the process of knowledge management. Deliberating on today's reality of high employee attrition in BPO sector, he said that Knowledge Management can play a crucial role in overcoming the crisis.
Tarun also brought up the issue of BPO units shifting their bases to Tier II and Tier III cities to overcome these problems and for greater availability of skill manpower and to lower the cost of operations. Giving a definite shape to the all-encompassing Knowledge Management he said, "KM is an emerging set of processes, organisational structures, applications and technologies that aim to leverage the ability of the capable, responsible, autonomous individual to act quickly and effectively."
Sam Chopra, President BPIAI brought forth the issue of data security in BPO industry and the role of human capital with specialised skills and the need to innovative, integrate and optimised knowledge in a team.
Anand Subramani of Perotsystems spoke about Knowledge Management in Healthcare BPO and said that KM plays a key role in Process Transformation by ensuring competence building, improving overall quality, analysing quality performance data to develop improvement initiatives, fostering better engagement with internal and external customers, driving high-performance culture and thereafter help in streamlining technology tools.
Rajgopal Swaminathan, Head KPO, HCL Technologies said that Knowledge Management in KPO is integrating 3 billion people of Asia who potentially compete for the same work. He said that according to Mc Kinsey report the KPO has $300 billion outsourcing potential. Giving an insight into country specific Delivery Duty Paid Orders, he said that most INCO terms are standard definitions with clear SOP and some INCO terms are non-standard definition. "The non-standard payments are country specific, port-specific and customer specific," he said.
Devender Malhotra of Wipro BPO deliberated on business problems while managing knowledge in BPO. He said it included diverse operation including collaboration across globally distributed delivery & solution teams, constantly changing market, constant strive to achieve in-time low cost solution, consistency in the response/solution to the customer and loss of invaluable knowledge through people movement and attrition.
Ashwin Hoskote of Infosys BPO said that Knowledge Management is more than document management as it helps in creating communities and managing explicit information. Citing that ancient texts are the greatest examples of knowledge management, Hoskote said that process challenges in the present time includes organisation's processes, knowledge assets, companies within company and overcoming the challenge in the client's environment.
