Over the years, the international service sector has seen progressive growth. Starting with the outsourcing of transactional backend work and steadily evolving to handle activities of increasing complexity through BPOs, KPOs through Service Integrators / Providers, and GCCs or Global Capability Centres running their own captive centres, India has become a hub of choice considering the availability of an almost limitless pool of talent across every domain possible. With a substantial number of such GCCs that have mushroomed all over the country in the past few years and quite a few in the pipeline waiting to set shop over the next few years, an ongoing debate on the nature of the staff – especially the top leadership is rife nowadays. While I see a general unwillingness and doubts to hire leaders from the service industries to head these GCCs with the assumption that they will not be able to create a particular kind of culture, my view is slightly different. 

Having worked in both the service industry as well as product companies, I have realized that a mindset that embraces some of the attributes of both will prove to be beneficial. The service mindset is usually execution heavy. The clients decide what they want and we need to execute in accordance with their strategies. The product companies make their own strategies. GCCs lie somewhere in between. They are an intrinsic part of the parent organization, yet created to aid execution. So, in a way, they drive the need to be custodians of the processes that they are supposed to execute in alignment with the organizational strategies. It’s kind of the best of both worlds and GCCs can truly benefit with employees who can understand how to strike that balance. 

Many a time I have seen people from the service industry struggling with the paradigm shift of not realizing that they actually own the processes that they are executing when they join a product company. While following Standard Operating Procedures in regulated environments is good, people at the heart of operations also know how to make these processes better. However, instead of making those changes that they know will create efficient workflows, they are very often seen living with the pain of following complicated legacy processes that take double the time to deliver half the benefits. I am not referring to the continuous process improvements that contribute to incremental changes but to those radical game-changing ideas with the potential to bring immense benefits to the business.

Taking a hard look at the way businesses, processes, and workflows have been set up, joining the dots by following the communication flow both upstream and downstream, making boundary changes, weeding out redundancies, and reconnecting the dots to bring in agility can further help the parent organization to optimize headcount by channelizing their skillsets where they are needed the most and not just in managing transactional activities to ensure that multiple non-standard processes are followed using multiple Standard Operating Procedures. Such transactional activities should undergo rigorous standardization and be automated wherever possible.

We need to run a business where our processes are standard and the customer experience is tailor-made – not the other way around.

The second most important aspect to consider is keeping the business financially viable, but the rising cost of resources in India especially starting at the mid-level is slowly eroding this benefit and giving way to other economic options thus threatening our biggest competitive edge. So, we need to heavily invest in creating unique differentiators that give back tremendous savings to the organization and that is only possible through creative disruption.

Literally speaking “Capability” is the middle name of GCCs and sooner or later, this capability will be tested not just in terms of competence and skillsets required to run efficient processes but in terms of the value added by questioning the very existence of these said processes in their current forms. We should therefore be open to embracing new methods, new technologies, and new ways of working and we should be able to see the current landscape through a new lens. Disruption is good – as long as the building blocks that come apart are used to construct something that is more agile; even if it means that not all the blocks are necessarily used – some have to be discarded, some others can be repurposed.

After all, as Darwin once said – “It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; but the one most responsive to change”.