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S Chandran, senior consultant with the
banking financial services industry (BFSI) at TCS, would have never
dreamt of a career in an IT company a few years earlier. He studied
agricultural economy and served for 17 long years as an economist
with the Bank of India, planning and formulating strategies for
the bank’s priority sector lending. This agricultural economist
is one among the 200-odd bankers of the BFSI group in TCS. Almost
all of them have over a decade- long experience in banking, some
over two decades. Leaving behind their career in the banking sector,
they are now wedded to the software industry and are a part of the
programming teams.
The beginnings
TCS, like other Indian software companies,
had little idea that it would need non-IT domain experts on its
payroll, in so many numbers. Things started happening from the mid-eighties.
Indian software firms realised that they can be actually more ambitious
and compete with multinational consulting firms like KPMG and McKinsey.
IT firms started hiring domain experts to demonstrate their domain
expertise to their clients.
“The non-IT domain experts represent
a breed of cross-pollination between the two pure lines—IT
and other domains. You know, the hybrids are three times more vigorous
than their parents,” says Chandran. His colleague Ramachandra,
principal consultant of BFSI at TCS, is a chartered accountant,
who was the former executive director of the Bangalore Stock Exchange.
At TCS, he provides domain support to development teams, prepares
backgrounds for proposals and trains programmers. For him, the interesting
part of his job is about absorbing the international market trends,
best practices of the stock exchanges (be that of Switzerland or
Bermuda), following the clearing and settlement areas and identifying
business opportunities for his company. Ramachandra is truly excited
about the opportunities that software firms provide in terms of
exposure to international stock markets: “I think what I have
learnt about stock exchange operations in the past five years at
TCS is more than what I did in my ten-year association with Indian
bourses.”
The challenges
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| Ranjit Pisharothy |
Dr Saji Salam |
There are, of course, challenges in the
new turf. But living in the IT jungle, it is not very difficult,
provided one has a learning aptitude. “Whenever I have doubts,
I get it clarified with my tech-friends informally over a cup of
coffee,” says Ramachandra.
When he had joined TCS, Ramachandra did
not have any clue about what his role in a software firm would be.
“For me it was an experiment—it’s like entering into
a tunnel without knowing where the end is. I guess even for TCS
taking a non-IT person like me was an experiment.” However,
the experiment has worked very well that TCS now has hundreds of
non-IT domain experts (excluding administrative and other support
staff), constituting a significant portion of its total employees
strength.
Dr Saji Salam, consultant—healthcare
and life sciences practice with Cognizant Technology Solutions,
makes a similar observation. He says, “My entry into the IT
world was when the industry was toying with the idea of going vertical
to address the requirements from clients who were used to consultants
who understood the requirements of the industry and spoke the language
of the specific vertical.”
During the initial days the feeling was
one of surprise as to “What is a doctor doing in an IT company?
Today, there is more acceptance to the role of healthcare informatician.
However, the perception that a doctor may not be having enough knowledge
of technology still seems to persist in some pockets.”
Cognizant since 1998 has been aligned across
verticals and has consciously tried to build the verticals with
domain and functional experts, who have specialised in the given
vertical for at least 10 years. He says, “You would see that
Indian IT companies are slowly shifting from a delivery focused
organisation to a business/vertical-focused organisation.”
Dr Salam’s concern is whether Indian
IT companies have reached that level of specialisation in healthcare
informatics to the extent that his knowledge could be exploited
effectively. He emphasis that a high level understanding of technology
is required to build the bridge between technology and the unique
requirements of the healthcare world. But the important challenge
is to keep oneself abreast of the latest happenings in his domain.
Dr Salam attends as many medical conferences as possible and voraciously
reads through healthcare journals with IT focus.
Dr Sumanth Raman, senior consultant of
healthcare group at TCS, who practised medicine for a few years,
takes all attempts to be in touch with the field. “I would
say that a domain expert, especially a doctor, needs to practice
his/her domain at least two hours a day to stay productive and resourceful
in the job. Only then, you can develop your contacts, which will
be of use to upgrade your domain knowledge and even to develop business
for the organisation.” He joined TCS in 1999 after seeing the
potential of IT for improving patient care. “As a physician,
my interest is to see how IT can improve patient care and the administration
part of running a hospital,” he adds.
Focusing on the prerequisites of a non-IT
domain expert for adapting to software environment, Dr Raman elaborates:
“Very good communication skill is a must. You may be a brilliant
doctor but unless you have a solid communication skill, how will
you make the programmers understand your domain concepts?”
According to him the non-IT domain experts, who have some exposure
to middle or senior management level, stand in a good stead.
“I would prefer to hire doctors who
had working experience as resident medical officers, etc, rather
than a fresher from college,” he says. As a domain expert,
he responses to the proposals, makes demos to clients, who are invariably
doctors. “A doctor understands technology better when another
medico explains that to him,” he says. In his case, his role
continues even after the completion of the projects “to remain
interface between the technical members and the clients. Because
it is I, who sell the concept to them.”
Chandran emphasis that every IT organisation
should have a right blend of people, process and technology. “And
people means both IT and non-IT domain experts.” He believes
that the career growth has nothing to do with the background. “The
non-IT persons could rise to even head a software firm. Why not?”
he asks.
Ranjit Pisharothy made a successful climb
up the IT ladder. An MTech (Electricals) from IIT, Madras, who had
spent his life working as a process design specialist in the Submarine
Design Group of the Defence R&D, he is now the vice president
of a leading an IteS/BPO company, Vetri Software India Limited.
As a career Naval officer and professional
submariner for 22 years, he has served on several ships and submarines
of the Indian Navy, he says his apprehension before taking up an
offer from a IT company was “in the organisational synergy
area and on whether I would be an anachronistic old foggy, insisting
that processes and procedures were more important than “creativity.”
Leading young technical people, in the new economy, was bound to
be different from experiences of the past.”
“I successfully managed one of the
most prestigious projects of Defence R&D, involving multiple
disciplines and multiple agencies, for the design, development and
construction of a unique, remotely controlled, unmanned, submarine
platform —the first of it’s kind in the world. Managing
technical people calls for leadership of a different kind. Carrying
forward that philosophy, I am employing the process control and
technology management expertise, to best use in the practical world
of BPO.”
Vetri employs several hundred non-IT employees
at the processor level. At the leadership level only one out of
six managers are from the IT domain and at the mid-management level
the ratio of IT to non-IT is 1:8 approximately.
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