Nasscom to concentrate on BPO industry

Nasscom will increase its focus on the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, considering its prospects for growth. The $8.3 billion domestic BPO sector grew at a compound annual growth rate of 32 per cent during 2006-07.

"All along, we were concentrating on the IT sector, since BPO was still a small industry. But with a newer executive council that has more membership from the BPO industry, clearly the emphasis will be on BPO as well," said the recently appointed chairman of Nasscom, Lakshmi Narayanan, vice-chairman, Cognizent, on the sidelines of the graduation ceremony at S P Jain College of Management.

He said the BPO industry had been quick to realign its business strategy in order to retain growth. "The industry is also realigning and transforming and moving away from activities that are not going to be productive or give high margins and move to better value added segments," he said.

The search for a president for the software sector lobby group is still going on. Narayanan's present concerns at Nasscom include getting sufficient talent to meet the demand of the fast growing industry both for the IT and BPO segments, promoting innovative and secure environment. "Security will be a prime focus. Apart from educating the organisation on the need to have global standards, we plan to create some institutional infrastructure or a self regulatory body in order to make sure that the issue remains on the agenda for a longer time," said Narayanan.

As for the talent crunch he believes that the three-pronged approach that Nasscom has started will continue.

The first among the three is to encourage creative collaboration between the academic institutes within the industry so that relevant curriculum are incorporated in the courses. Second is to continue with the initiative of finishing schools and create a new eco-system and finally to urge the government to deregulate educational institutes.