Ashok Sethi, managing director of research major TNS in China, has this interesting view on what makes China tickput up a No Smoking sign, he says, and nobody will bother but publish a rule book which tells people not to smoke and clearly lays out the consequences of being caught smoking in a prohibited place, and everybody will toe the party-line. It is the clarity of the system of rules, and the rewards and punishments associated with them that makes China so different from our own country in a multitude of little ways.

In a whirlwind trip that took me from the lakes of Hangzhou through the bustling cities of Shanghai, Wuxi, Tianjin, and Beijing, ending in a brilliant afternoon on the Great Wall of China, the adherence to processes kept surfacing as the trip proceeded like clockwork through sparkling train stations, airports, and some of the widest expressways and roads in the world. The highlight of the Asia Society Annual Conference held in Tianjin was the eloquence of Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit who held her own admirably in the opening panel featuring the mayors of Tianjin, Singapore, and Melbourne, in a discussion on the paradox of growth and sustainability. In my panel on innovation, our story on building a fifty billion dollar IT and BPO industry in record time with its resultant impact on employment and new aspirations for the middle class compared favorably with other success stories.

Ganesh natarajan

The Wuxi New Development area is one more example of Chinas ability to create a full city dedicated to outsourcing. And contrary to expectations that infrastructure readiness is rarely followed by a conscious effort at brand building or global marketing, the President of the city and the Communist Party Secretary presented a grand vision over lunch which showed us that this is one city that means business. A clear resource development and training plan, the willingness to attract companies, not just from India but also the East and the West to invest in outsourcing centers.

The UN forum on City Informatization held at the Shanghai Convention Center, in the heart of the spectacular suburb of Pudong, featured an interesting set of panels; one chaired by the CIO of British Telecom on the changing role of the CIO, and the other, which I chaired, focused on globalization of talent outsourcing. Inevitably both discussions converged with the main challenge of CIOs around the world being the search for talent to deliver mission critical projects.

According to a consensus that emerged, it is no longer conceivable that all jobs in the IT sector could be outsourced to India, and the need to create workforce pools in various parts of the world, enabling them to collaborate through networking technologies is a challenge that needs to be addressed by all innovation leaders in both the East and the West. Global development platforms permit multi-location teams to participate in problem analysis and solution design. This of course need not be just seamless processes and technology but a cultural reorientation to ensure that human interfaces across countries, and even continents, can be effectively deployed.

The Indian IT sector has already taken the first steps with the most significant firms having a presence in China, and one or more locations in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. While many experiments have gone through the teething problems of attracting and enabling a raw workforce to meet our quality and capability standards, some recent successes like Zensars deployment of Polish, Chinese, and professionals from over a dozen other countries in some of our global projects give us the confidence that truly global teams can and will be deployed both on site and off-shore in future projects.

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