Time For A Restart

Fear of layoffs, salary cuts and perks are the most talked about issues
nowadays. The IT industry has received a major jolt due to the current market
conditions in the US. And as the cliché goes, whenever the US sneezes, the world
catches a cold.

Weakening of the American economy is bad news, not just for India, but for
the rest of the world too. Indian companies have major outsourcing deals from
the US. The current conditions do not imply no business from the US but slow
business. Companies with plans of investment and expansion have put their plans
on hold or postponed them indefinitely till the conditions improve or at least
show signs of revival. This could signify mixed signals for India. The slowdown
in the US economy could push outsourcing up to new levels to low-cost
destinations and India here has a definite advantage over other countries. It
could also imply the opposite of the big fish eating the smaller one, which is
businesses moving to small vendors to cut costs and expenditures.

But aren't they losing out on good business opportunities at this hour? Is
this not the right time to gear up for the future?

This is the time to streamline current running businesses which in perfect
circumstances lacks the systematic approach. Work pressure and deadlines make a
business dependent on manual and human error prone systems which sometimes fail
to deliver at a crucial time. It is time to pause, reflect and realign
strategies. If the industry has to survive, then it needs to adapt to the
changing market scenarios quickly.

Concurrently, this quiet period needs to be used to get the existing resource
pool ready for the next big wave. To address this issue positively, workshops
and technical trainings should be conducted to educate the workforce at regular
intervals. Sessions on soft-skills and cultural orientation programs should be
conducted to make the people more customer-centric. Now that foreign languages
are no longer barriers in communication with outside world, companies need to
grow beyond US and explore markets in Europe.

And yes, this is indeed a difficult time for that part of the workforce which
was just present in the office to increase the headcount. They are the first
ones to be noticed at this hour. They need to wake up and take up more
responsibility, rather than just being a workstation number.

This is indeed a real testing time for the Indian IT industry, but there's no
real reason to give-up. In the past too, the IT industry has shown its
resistance to the negative events following the dot com bust it had proved
itself as a powerful industry to reckon with. It's time to get the act together,
re-organize, re-align and re-program our way of operating. Perfect time for a
restart and CTRL+ALT+DEL to delete all the unwanted resources and processes to
start afresh.