I’d concluded in Part 1 of this blog post that the Indian IT industry has the optimum quality of software engineers. My assertion was based on the work done by the industry so far since its inception in the early 1990s.
In this second part, I’ll examine this topic from the perspective of the work likely to be done by the industry in future.
The Indian IT industry has three growth strategies going forward.
GO WIDE:
Continue to offer the mainstay coding service but go beyond the traditional East Coast and West Coast markets, and expand into Midwest and other regions of the USA.
Since the offering is not new, this strategy will not require higher caliber of engineering talent than at present.
These new markets may bring new challenges related to racism, xenophobia, politics, immigration, etc. Therefore, they will require additional inputs in sales, marketing and lobbying rather than software engineering.
GO ACROSS:
Go beyond coding and start pursuing some of the initiatives I highlighted in my blog posts entitled Indian IT: Turning Crisis Into Opportunity and Indian IT – Turning Crisis Into Opportunity: Part 2 viz.:
- Go up the services value chain
- Target the CMO organization
- Rethink fixed price deals
- Redefine digital transformation
All of these will largely require extra capabilities around sales, marketing, consulting, business analysis, systems integration and program management – but not software engineering.
Big challenge for Indian IT industry:
"IT Services companies want to digital work for banks. But banks want to outsource only legacy work". #GIC #Insource #BFSIhttps://t.co/UcNoO2dZep via @timesofindia— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) August 15, 2018
GO DEEP:
Start offering coding of components, microservices, products, development tools, operating systems, etc. This was the fifth initiative in my aforementioned two part blog post. High-end coding of this nature will surely require higher quality of software engineers. But winning and delivering deals in this space would require the industry to overcome hurdles that require non-engineering capabilities viz. consulting, stakeholder management, immigration laws, etc.
All three growth strategies for the Indian IT industry call for capabilities that are substantially outside coding / software engineering.
Sourcing the moderate amount of higher quality engineering talent required for executing some of the high-end coding work will not a big deal. All it would take is to up the starting salaries at leading leading engineering colleges and qualify back for their campus placements.
I’d be one of the happiest people around if that happens – it would be great to see my professional alma maters Wipro, i-flex et al back in the corridors of my academic alma mater IIT Bombay!
