When Opportunity Knocked...

Harish Mehta writes the story of the Indian IT industry in The Maverick Effect. In the beginning, the common problems of the industry were far too many and seemingly insurmountable.

 

Back then, brand India was a major problem. We were still considered a dirt poor country of snake charmers. Socialist. License raj. Pathetic product quality.

“Against the backdrop of a poor nation on the brink (of bankruptcy), Indians were standing in American boardrooms, making lofty promises to help them conquer their most complex, technological challenges.”

No wonder the pitches rarely succeeded in winning any projects. Even worse:

“How to you help a nation-wide scatter of companies that suffer from the West’s reluctance to put ‘India’ and ‘software’ in the same sentence?”

 

The answer came in the form of a problem that nobody in the West wanted to work on. Yes, the Y2K problem (Older computer system stored the year in 2 digits. Come the year 2000, the last 2 digits of the current year would become 00. Try and calculate how many years since, say, 1991, and most software would say 00 – 91 = - 91! In the finance industry, this would be disastrous). Indian IT companies had found their opening. And boy, did they use it:

“We now had marquee Fortune 500 companies as clients.”

 

Fixing the Y2K issue was what they were hired for. As they did that, Indian engineers increasingly became visible as people who could learn poorly documented software, even re-engineer it to enhance it and add new features.

 

As the demand for Indian IT engineers exploded (due to this Y2K problem), the pathetically slow data links across the world was the next issue. There was no option other than the engineers being on-site. Since most of the companies at risk with Y2K were American, the US realized it needed to create/expand the relevant type of visas. Hence, the H-1B visas made available exploded.

 

As Indian IT engineers went to the West, they faced a lot of issues. Culture shock. The accent problem (Americans found it annoying that each region of India had a different accent). Cold weather. Lack of vegetarian food. Lack of maids. Indian cooking setting off smoke alarms…

 

But succeed they did. And success created new problems. The Y2K handling showed Indian IT capabilities. So even after the year 2000 came and went, IT projects continued to flow to India. Suddenly the mood in the West changed:

“From Y2K heroes, we had become job-stealing thieves.”

The word ‘Bangalored’ had entered the American dictionary.

 

As the backlash began, how were Indian IT companies to respond? Well, software development is notorious for its problems of scope change (defining what needs to be done), schedule delays, and cost overruns. Carnegie Mellon (CMU) came up with a method to try and control those called SEI CMM. Level 5 was its highest certification. It was extremely hard to get, but Indian companies got more of it than any other country. All big corporations need objective criteria to pick vendors, and when CMM Level 5 became one such criteria, the shortlist was inevitably full of Indian companies. The perception was changing from just low cost to quality and predictability also.

 

How much the view has changed today. ‘India’ and ‘software’ feel like natural fits in the same sentence. As we saw, it took a lot of work and yes, luck. But remember, it needs a lot of preparation to be able to seize the opportunity when it does knock on the door.