India’s Emerging Status in the Global Knowledge Process Outsourcing Industry

Abstract

The challenge of deploying the knowledge assets of an organization to create competitive advantage becomes more crucial as the marketplace is increasingly becoming competitive and the rate of innovation is rising, so that knowledge evolved has to be assimilated at an ever-faster rate. Moreover, there are trends for employees to retire earlier and for increasing mobility, leading to loss of knowledge. Moreover, competitive pressures are reducing the size of the workforce, which holds this knowledge. In order to build competitiveness, it is necessary that companies cut costs and outsource those staff functions, which are peripheral, non-core activities and which add no value, to specialist, outside firms, who can do the same job at a fraction of what it cost the companies to run an in-house department. This would free them up to concentrate on matters more crucial to their businesses, like manufacturing or product management, or marketing, and concentrate on knowledge management in only the core processes. Some of the KPO services that can be outsourced include, research & development, business and technical analysis, learning solutions, animation & design, business & market research, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, medical services, writing & content development, legal services, intellectual property research, design and developments for automotive and aerospace industries, data analytics, network management,
training & consultancy. A Confederation of Indian Industry study states that KPO would grow at 46 per cent to become $17 billion sector by 2010. A report by Evalueserve predicts that India will capture more than 70 percent of the KPO sector by 2010. India has been ranked the most preferred KPO destination owing to the large talent pool, quality IT training, government policies, and low labor costs. Although countries such as Russia, China, the Czech Republic, Ireland, and Israel are also expected to join the competition, but India is well equipped to meet this emerging sector's challenges and in near future it is emerging to become the global KPO hub.