IT Companies, Time For A Taste Of Your Own Medicine!

I belong to an age when Indian IT Services organizations dominated the earth. They were spreading everywhere, taking on every challenge on earth and astonishing themselves as well as onlookers by how much they could achieve! 

The above lines could very well be the starting monologue of the next Jurassic Park movie if you just replace ‘Indian IT Services Organizations’ with Dinosaur!  Yes, that’s how close these organizations have come towards becoming irrelevant.

No doubt, when I make this claim there will be a lot of eyebrows going up. Well, it is true that IT companies are still showing a lot of growth potential, there are still a few large deals being brokered and the revenue stream is steady and healthy. But at the same time, the corporations are feeling the heat as well. Large deals are far and few, while the old technologies they have been feasting on are fast becoming extinct. The ecosystem is growing weaker and weaker.

Every IT organization wants to become the one stop digital shop for their customers to take on the onslaught of new age technology and demands of their customers. Yet, its baffling how little of that digital tonic they themselves are keen on taking. As we speak, almost 90% of the IT organizations’ internal and external websites are still running on age old servers.

So, how to survive then? Suddenly every IT organization wants to become the one stop digital shop for their customers. That seems to be the strategy to take on the onslaught of new age technology and new demands of their customers. Yet, its baffling how little of that digital tonic they themselves are keen on taking. As we speak, almost 90% of the IT organizations’ internal and external websites are still running on age old servers and offer little precious amount of digital innovation.

If I were a customer and I were looking for someone to provide me IT services, would I be willing to give business to any of those? I doubt it.

One particular scenario comes into mind. We IT Managers in these organizations spend a terrible amount of time trying to find suitable resources for our respective projects or deliveries or programmes.

Often our savior is that resource manager who has a limited tool in front of her to do a primitive search and find a resource for us. More often than not, this resource is not what we want him/her to be. At the same time there are many of those whom we really want but do not have the access required to get them on board. How difficult it is to take this manual process into the digital domain? Imagine if there existed:

• An employee portal where people can fill in detailed information about themselves, upload a photo, create a video resume and have a lot of details about their capabilities. They can look for openings and apply if they are on bench or not allocated to any work. They should be able to ask for testimonials from their peers
• A manager’s portal where managers can publish openings in their projects. They can do a semantic search to find out resources, watch videos and their other activities, testimonials and then call up to see if the candidate is actually what he thinks she/he is and then allocate him/her straight into the project.
• A strategic leadership’s portal on which managers can view what type of people are available by geography, what are the most searched technologies, what is his bench composition etc. Managers can take a decision on next year’s hiring numbers, learning & development expenditure and target customers/technologies here. A solid analytics engine can help bring out insights on which technical skills are driving demand, where a company is losing people and where it needs to build next gen capabilities.
• A marketing executive’s portal which will have a mobile front end allowing sales people to have a birds eye view of resource availability so he can use this real time information in their sales pitch. 

Endless possibilities, right? It is really disheartening to see that IT Organizations are falling far behind in the technology race. Innovative thinking is almost non-existent and everyone still wants to run the race just for the heck of it. The bad news is, these practices won’t cut it anymore in the increasingly ultra-competitive market… at least not for long! (Image Source: Pixbay)

Ankan Paul graduated from the One Year Full Time MBA (EPGP) at IIM Indore in 2014 and currently works as a Product Manager with L&T Infotech