Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Welcome to the Revolution

How outsourcing is changing the way we see the world, and how the world sees India.

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I wrote this article as a guest columnist in the August 22nd issue of <a href="http://www.indiatoday.com">India Today</a>. A few years ago, the legendary Alyque Padamsee wrote that India needed to be re-branded. We were no longer the third-world country with striking images of poverty, but instead, he argued, the world’s Brain Trust. He suggested the political appointment of a Brand Ambassador who would be in charge of the communication elements that positioned India in the light in which it had found itself. Whether Mr. Padamsee was vying for that job himself is a matter unimportant to the discussion. What’s relevant, however, is the sentiment behind his hypothesis: that first, in India’s healthy participation in scientific academia, and now in her burgeoning industry of outsourcing, we have found a proposition to re-position the country to the world. The US private sector continues to find new ways to add to this panoply of low-cost outsourced services. It’s not just about call-centers and IT services anymore. Your medicine cabinet has drugs whose R&D now happens in India. Your local Pottery Barn has 95% of its furniture manufactured in India. Your live-chat representatives at Earthlink facing the orange glow of your frantic typing--they sit in India too. Accounting will follow, as will tax preparation. In fact, anything that doesn’t require physical proximity will one day work its way to a cheaper place. This is the ineludible stampede of work from paper blueprints to digital bitmaps.  The US has seen this cycle before. A hundred years ago, half the American population worked on farms. Those jobs migrated to manufacturing, and eventually to service. Now, those services jobs are migrating into management, design, architecture and planning jobs. Each of these migratory cycles has always had a happy ending. But they haven’t come without their share of angst, backlash and anxiety. And so while India’s outsourcing industry thrums with vibrant activity, a dark cloud of post-pink-slip American anger looms menacingly above. For those displaced US workers, there is some solace in history. A few decades ago, there was another rapid migration that resulted in a massive loss of jobs, and the creation of an angst-ridden phase for the labor pool: the computer. As Chris Anderson of Wired puts it, yesterday’s “I was replaced by a computer” is today’s “They sent my job to India!” It is the nature of an industrial ecosystem to re-train itself. The continuum that is now disrupted by the advent of Indian knowledge workers shall once again be restored, albeit in a new direction, and with new tributaries. But the real breakthrough is yet to come. In freeing up developmental dollars that were once spent in fixing issues and solving service problems, it is now possible for the global enterprise, courtesy of an efficient Indian machine, to spend those same dollars in innovation and research. Point releases give way to new product concepts. Statements of Work now give way to patent filings. Remote management of deliverables helps companies weed out potentially inept managers who have previously hidden behind disorganized masses of production propaganda. We are now freer to create. Outsourcing, perhaps, is industrial evolution in its highest form. That evolutionary baton is now, happily enough, in India’s hand. And yet, for all our knowledge advancement, the infrastructural handicaps we work with remain: our cities teem with eager young programmers like hopeful starlets in Hollywood; our roads and sidewalks spill over with traffic; our basic utilities like water and electricity churn at the whim of random officials; and our politics seems to ignore the clearing in which we have found ourselves. It is India’s greatest irony that for a country that came together just fifty years ago to liberate itself with a conjoined battle-cry, we have migrated to an ecosystem in which each man is for himself. Still, there is awe to be felt in watching the rapid ascension of India’s labor force. They’re at the hub of the world’s greatest economic disruption yet--the digital network that will comprise a modern corporation’s accounting, production, and analytical functions. Armed with nothing but a mouse and a keyboard, they’re the new warriors that have pulled the country out of its proverbial doldrums, dressed it up in its Sunday best, and like an army of Lilliputians, carried it forward into the global limelight. Mr. Padamsee may not have known how rich India’s outsourcing future would become when he suggested that India be re-branded as the world’s Brain Trust. The reference, of course, comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s group of diverse academic advisors during the early part of his presidency. But India is more than just academia. India has proven to be an efficient engine that processes information quickly and provides stellar, working deliverables. Perhaps Mr. Padamsee wouldn’t mind if we amended his suggestion. Perhaps, India, with all she is currently armed with, is better positioned as the world’s Superbrain. http://www.brutalclarity.com/index.php/65/
 

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