My friend Phil Fersht was at the annual Nasscom event in Mumbai last week and wrote “More MBA, less ABAP is the recipe for India’s digital success”.
There is much to like in what he says, but I would go further
a) Much Less ABAP
My book SAP Nation shows a $ 200 billion a year ecosystem ready for disrupting, even collapsing. Part of it can come from Indian firms cannibalizing their own services in that market. Much more could come from Indian firms diversifying to SaaS vendors that SAP customers are migrating to and providing third party maintenance to SAP customers. Unfortunately, many will just tell their customers to wait and see how SAP’s next-gen product, S4HANA matures.
b) Digital with Big D
As I wrote in this post, Digital Transformations require a wide portfolio of skills. “There are so many opportunities to digitize products, channels, shop floors, logistics, business models etc. So many legacy systems need to upgraded and integrated to. The portfolio of skills needed to build a vibrant Digital Enterprise is very wide.” Many Indian firms have some of these components in place, but many need to acquire digital agencies, product centric/R&D focused practices, and as Phil says maybe even some MBAs for digital strategy and business model transformation.
c) Refocus on Moore’s Law
This is probably the biggest change Indian firms need to make. They have to quit leading with labor intense models. A blend of symbiotic man-machine skills is key. Indian firms should have been leading the automation of knowledge work. They missed the last wave where Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others have shown the art of the possible. Plenty more to be done there. And even where the model is labor heavy they need to dust off their CMM and Six Sigma disciplines they religiously applied 10-15 years ago. As I wrote here, Moore’s Law is back in the enterprise, and to offset the wage and real estate inflation that plague India, Indian firms need to become even more acutely focused on continuous improvement.
d) Become geographically agile
When I interviewed Mike McNamara, CEO of Flextronics, the large contract manufacturer last year, I was struck by his comment that they moved a quarter of their physical plant across borders. Manufacturing has become agile – to take advantage of changing US energy economics, to be closer to emerging middle classes in Indonesia, Brazil or wherever and other trends. If physical plant can be moved quickly even with all the logistical challenges, there is no reason why labor pools cannot be similarly agile. Indian firms need to evolve the delivery model – doing the bulk of the work in India may not be the best way any more to service clients in the throes of complex digital transformations.
