– By Arihant Garg
India’s global capability centres (GCCs) have rapidly transformed from process hubs established mainly to reap the cost advantage to innovation epicentres playing a pivotal role in parent organisations’ strategic decision-making. In the post-COVID-19 world, digital technologies saw rapid adoption, and GCCs played a larger and more significant role by driving global organisations’ digital transformational initiatives. In today’s highly competitive world, organisations have become increasingly data driven to stay ahead of competition. To augment the efficiency of their efforts to draw actionable insights from a large volume of datasets, organisations centralise their analytical capabilities by setting up a dedicated centre of excellence (CoE) within GCCs. This trend could present unique opportunities for Indian GCCs to further strengthen their integration with the parent organisation.
A centralised analytics development operation in GCCs can support organisations in numerous ways. For instance, it allows them to easily share best practices across the organisation, develop cross-functional use cases and create a collaborative environment. Taking advantage of the advancements in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and big data analytics, analytics CoEs can play a pivotal role in accelerating innovation across the parent organisation. Some organisations also adopt the hub and spoke model for setting-up analytics CoEs. By acting as hub, analytics CoEs within Indian GCCs perform bulk of centralised analytics development operations and the spokes located across different countries perform location-specific development and insight generation. These spokes enrich the insights from the hub by adding local perspectives and design offerings that meet unique local needs. The result will be enhanced competitiveness in all markets where the organisation operates and de-risking of analytics operations.
As more global organisations across sectors show interest in the data-driven approach, Indian GCCs can capitalise on this opportunity by augmenting their analytics expertise to offer value-added services and create new revenue streams for the parent organisation, thereby strengthening their transition from cost to profit centres. If Indian GCCs succeed in developing robust innovation capabilities in the analytics domain, global firms will be encouraged to enhance the role of these centres in their innovation agenda and create more India-based global roles. India has emerged as the world’s third-largest start-up ecosystem1 and many Indian start-ups have demonstrated their capabilities to build robust innovative solutions. The vibrant start-up ecosystem presents Indian GCCs with a unique opportunity to collaborate with them and experiment with emerging technologies to develop sector-specific use cases.
India’s inherent strength—an abundant engineering talent pool makes it an ideal place for setting up analytical CoEs. India is home to over 4 lakh AI, ML and big data analytics professionals, the second largest globally. The availability of cloud implementation, tool-specific implementation and domain skills also adds to India’s strength. The government’s continuous focus on promoting digital skills and creating a steady supply of talented analytics professionals by setting up dedicated institutes, creates an enabling environment for analytics oriented GCCs to thrive in India. As the workforce in GCCs increases, creating a conducive environment for diverse perspectives has become essential. Indian GCCs are making headway on this front by promoting a culture of diversity, equality and inclusion, thereby contributing to similar initiatives of global organisations.
While India can gain a lot by becoming a hub for global corporations’ analytical capabilities, it will also have to tackle various challenges in the future. For instance, rising labour cost in India means that the cost arbitrage narrative may not stay attractive for long, thus leaving skill availability and innovation as future competitiveness drivers. Even in this space, there are challenges as India might lack availability of deep technology skills in emerging technologies such as quantum computing. Equipping the workforce with the right technical talent and retaining talent through enhanced employee value propositions (and experience) are the need of the hour.
To conclude, Indian GCCs have shown a good grasp of business knowledge, innovation and emerging technologies, which encourages global organisations to set up analytics CoEs within these GCCs and get their business-critical analytics delivered from India. The ability of these centres to quickly adapt to emerging trends in the past has cemented their role as reliable business partners. Greater collaboration with start-ups and the availability of high-quality talent could enable Indian GCCs to become even more critical for the parent organisation by radically improving insights for business decisions through cutting-edge analytical solutions.
(Arihant Garg is a Partner, Lighthouse (Data, AI & Emerging Technologies) at KPMG in India.)
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