Sunil Mirani As Chief Executive Officer of Ugam Research Solutions, India's pioneering provider of market research operations solutions to the global Market Research Industry, Sunil has overall responsibility for developing, and delivering upon, the long-term vision and strategy for the company. Read the full biography here.

Scribe to Poet

How the KPO market is changing

9th September, 2010

A report on the Indian IT services by The Economist more than 5 years ago concluded by saying that the Indian IT industry will survive, and truly become a force to reckon with, if it moves from beyond just taking orders to proactively creating products and solutions. In other words, moving from being a scribe to being the poet. This powerful analogy has been stuck in my mind ever since, and in fact the question is relevant even today; not just for the IT services industry, but the entire spectrum of “knowledge services” at large.

It is now increasingly accepted that the developing world has become the new hotbed of innovation. $2000 automobiles, $100 computers, $30 mobile phones and $0.02 per minute of mobile calling – all these are examples of products and services that have been created by companies in the emerging markets. As described in extensive coverage in leading publications such as the Harvard Business Review and The Economist, these have been done not just by creating stripped down versions of their counterparts in the developed world, but by completely reinventing production and distribution systems, and by creating entirely new business models. It is widely expected that 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years will come from emerging markets, of which India and China alone will account for 40%. Most of the emerging multinationals are from the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China. Using “frugal innovation”, and creatively adapting existing technologies in new areas, companies such as India’s Tata Group, China’s Haier, and Brazil’s Embraer have become models of the new and emerging multinationals.

Indian companies specifically, are applying mass manufacturing techniques to sophisticated services such as IT and healthcare....

Recognizing this trend, the current leading multinationals - like GE, P&G, Dell, Cisco - are trying to rapidly reorganize themselves to take full advantage of this phenomenon by establishing R&D bases in such countries, and apply what GE calls “reverse innovation”, i.e. taking products created for the emerging markets and exporting them to the developed/home markets. The above phenomenon is not limited to manufacturing, but also applicable to services. Indian companies specifically, are applying mass manufacturing techniques to sophisticated services such as IT and healthcare, and using innovative human resource management techniques to create powerful, new, and extremely successful business models.

What does this mean for the ‘knowledge process outsourcing’ (a much abused term which I use with great reluctance) market? Whether in areas like healthcare claims processing, legal process outsourcing or financial / equity research – it provides opportunities for companies to go beyond just getting work done cheaper, better and faster; but, rather do things that they hadn’t done before, and open up new and differentiated revenue streams. In areas like Market Research and Analytics – a topic close to my heart – this provides ample opportunities for MR agencies (both large and small) to look beyond the traditional ‘outsourcing of operations’. Devoid of any past baggage, and fueled by talent, innovation, ambition and entrepreneurial skills, leading industry players in countries like India can provide western MR firms a great platform to leverage their deep knowledge, experience and client relationships to quickly, and cost effectively, develop solutions in areas such as Social Media, mobile research, data mining and business intelligence; areas which are a must for any MR agency to remain relevant in the next 3-5 years.

...why does a survey scripter needs to work off a questionnaire authored by a researcher to create an online survey?

Even in the traditional ‘operations outsourcing’, there are ample opportunities to automate, innovate and re-engineer the process to make it more efficient, cost effective and of higher quality. The approach being taken is to strip down the research operations process and explore how elements of the process can be optimized.

For example, why does a survey scripter needs to work off a questionnaire authored by a researcher to create an online survey? With a technology led solution, once a researcher has finished authoring the questionnaire, it could be fed to a smart application that processes the questionnaire, interprets the instructions and automatically creates most of the survey program or script. Solution such as these, that make the MR process much faster and delivery higher quality, have been developed and are being deployed by offshore partners for their MR agency clients, giving the agencies an edge in their highly competitive landscape.

Leading offshore players are also beginning to leverage technology along with their MR domain expertise to impact the research offerings themselves. For example, various studies have shown that visually appealing / rich-interface surveys that make survey participation experience better, could be the answer to falling survey participation rates and questionable quality of the data. Offshore partners of MR agencies are addressing this need by building user friendly, ready-to-use solutions with which online surveys set-up using regular popular survey technologies are presented in rich interfaces (Flash, Flex etc.) without involving Flash designers or developers.

In some cases, technology is driving the way to managing the operational process in a better manner. For example, offshore partners of MR agencies are building and deploying Project or Workflow Management tools to allow much smoother management of projects across client, internal and partner organizations. Such tools help ensure that all project team members stay on top of the project with centralized dashboards, facilitate the sharing of information across the project team and eliminate several manual tasks when it comes to field management. Such tools can significantly boost the efficiency of the entire project team.

All these technology led solutions invariably require specific MR domain knowledge; such needs of the MR agencies are increasingly falling into the sweet-spot for the offshore operations partners who possess both the technology capability and the MR domain knowledge, and are proactively bringing such solutions to market.

The current recession in the developed markets provide the perfect opportunity for companies to take advantage of the above phenomenon. And with the proactive efforts taken by some of the service providers in the developing world, it won’t be long before the scribe indeed would have turned into a poet.

Sunil Mirani

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