Advantage India:

Large Human Resource

Every year, approximately 19 million students are enrolled in high schools and 10 million students in pre-graduate degree courses across India. Moreover, 2.1 million graduates and 0.3 million post-graduates pass out of India's non-engineering colleges. 

While 2.5-3 percent of them find jobs in other fields or pursue further studies abroad, the rest opt for employment in the IT industry. If the flow from high schools to graduate courses increases even marginally, there will be a massive increase in the number of skilled workers available to the industry. Even at current rates, there will approximately be 17 million people available to the IT industry by 2008.

Indian Education System 

The Indian education system places strong emphasis on mathematics and science, resulting in a large number of science and engineering graduates. Mastery over quantitative concepts coupled with English proficiency has resulted in a skill set that has enabled the country to take advantage of the current international demand for IT. 

Quality Manpower 

Indian programmers are known for their strong technical skills and their eagerness to accommodate clients. In some cases, clients outsource work to get access to more specialized engineering talent, particularly in the area of telecommunications. India also has one of the largest pools of English-speaking professionals. 

Government Policies

The Indian government recognizes that Information Technology will influence economic development extensively in the future. IT is a pat of government's national agenda and all policies are driven to achieve maximum benefit to their industry. 

The liberalization and deregulation initiatives taken by the Indian government are aimed at supporting growth and integration with the global economy. The reforms have reduced licensing requirements and made foreign technology accessible. The reforms have also removed restrictions on investment and made the process of investment easier. 

The government is actively promoting FDI, investments from NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) including Overseas Corporate Bodies (OCB's) owned by the NRIs. FDI can be brought in through the automatic route, based on powers accorded to the Reserve Bank of India. 

Till 1994, DOT was the sole provider of basic telecom services in India. The new National Telecom Policy has opened the field for private participants. 

After realizing the potential of India as a major IT power, the government has taken several initiatives to promote the development of IT. The Ministry of Information and Communication Technology is playing an active role in developing the infrastructure that supports the development of information technology. The IT Bill passed in 2000 provides a legal framework for the recognition of electronic contracts, prevention of computer crimes, electronic filing of documents, etc. 

Amendments have also been proposed in the Indian Evidence Act, Indian Penal Code and the RBI Act. The mechanism of digital signature has been proposed to address the issues of jurisdiction, authentication and origination. 

Recognizing the importance of Venture Capital Funding, the Ministry of Information Technology has set up a National Venture Fund for the Software and IT Industry with a corpus of Rs. 100 crore in association with the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) and Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI). The aim of the Fund is to provide Venture Capital to start up software professionals and IT units in the small-scale sector. 


(Source : NASSCOM)

Scope of Activities:

Although, with advances in technology, most of the activities can be handled from offshore, the model works well with certain activities. 

Peace of Moving Offshore:

Indosoft has perfected a fast-track methodology that eliminates the need for a pilot altogether, moves aggressively through transitioning offshore and delivers larger chunks of work-packets from offshore.

Structure:

A key question is - How to combine the IT teams of an organization and Indosoft so as to form a Virtual Extension? This involves three considerations - structure of the company, structure of offshore team and the governance model. 

Structure of IT Function
IT organization of a company consists of teams responsible for procurement of IT products and services, application maintenance and development, production support, operations, data center, help desk etc.

Structure of Offshore Team
The first task is setting the stage in terms of understanding the organization's vision for offshore outsourcing along with the key business drivers and documenting value delivery expectations. Indosoft's Account Manager and Project Manager deliberate with the client's leadership in program IT support functions. The understanding of the business perspective coupled with the drivers for offshore outsourcing, lead to arriving at the expectations from Indosoft and documenting them in quantitative terms.

Governance Model
Our approach envisages we build an Engagement Governing Board made up of leadership from the client and Indosoft. Through this Board, client would be able to exercise a complete operational control over the activities of the offshore team.

System & Processes:

Process Capabilities
Continuous process improvement strategies are built into the software development practices to ensure that customer expectations are met for each and every delivery cycle. These practices are standard techniques to review, monitor and optimize the project processes in order to achieve high value delivery. As a result, product and process quality are highly predictable in nature.
Indosoft, has spent significant time and resources to perfect its development processes and methodologies.
The delivery model defines quality up front and acquaints the customer with the processes that deal with monitoring and measuring the quality of deliverables continuously. 

Culture & Values:

In a knowledge based industry, any attempts to enforce an alien culture will pose major HR challenges. Indosoft addresses these sensitive issues by imparting cross-cultural training. Cultural appreciation is promoted using novel techniques like forming multi-cultural teams and conducting out-bound trainings.