Christine Lagarde, the IMF Chief said last week that India is poised to grow rapidly in the next few years and will double its GDP by 2019. Gary Hamel, the world’s most influential business thinker as per Wall Street Journal, said last month that India can achieve the target of $10 Trillion GDP (almost 5 times its current estimates) provided the country takes up some rather bold and global measures. Of course there was not much reference to timelines in his conversations. In January this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared his dream of growing India’s GDP size from $2 Trillion to $20 Trillion – that’s 10 times the current year’s estimates! A simple arithmetical calculation shows that even if the country can grow on an average annualised growth of 8%, it will take the country 29 years to reach the magical number of $20 Trillion. And all of that is only possible if the growth continues at a cumulative rate of 8% average. Even if the country is to achieve Hamel’s comparatively humble number of $10 Trillion, it will take 20 years to reach there, which is in 2035! If we were to up the ante of the growth to 10% annualised, we can reach there only in 2031.
So were Hamel and Modi not serious when they talked about achieving 5x and 10x of current GDP? Of course they were. During the first 44 years since independence, the GDP growth in the country was in the low single digits (mostly sub 4%). Between 1991 and now, there have been several good years where GDP growth in real terms has been in excess of 9%. Conditions today are ripe to keep the growth at 9% and in fact accelerate it further.
Within this growing boom, the contribution of the Services sector is clearly the largest – as is true for all emerging economies. This means, to achieve the breakneck speed of growth, it is not enough to merely grow more manufacturing industries and innovate there, there is a crying need to grow more services and innovate there. For our purpose, we include within the Services sector the staff functions of the Manufacturing sector as well – essentially meaning all white collar jobs.
Innovation in the Services sector, up until now, was mostly limited to process efficiency improvements as the only focus. With the advent of technology and newer thinking in the field of Business Process Management, radically different possibilities have begun to come through. Some companies have created specialist shared service units within their own corporate boundaries. Others have begun to outsource processes to specialists. Each of them has seen dramatic improvements in their cost management plans as well as customer care.
These are both transformational activities that require new strategies and new thinking. Not really a very easy thing to do in the best of the situations. No real guide exists on what the leaders have to do, to be on the transformation highway. Leadership is another big challenge. In the new world, things will be required to be done differently. Processes will evolve like never before. It might be relatively easy to clinically change the way processes were done hitherto, but extremely difficult to change mindsets of people who have done it their way for ever. On the other hand, there are leaders willing to change with the times, but just do not know how to. Our view is, beg, borrow, or steal liberally from industry and leader experiences. And also share liberally – both the issues as well as successes.
At SSF, we have taken up the task to do just that – to be the forum to create and disseminate knowledge for excellence in BPM. We spread awareness about BPM, establish winning practices, build a strong network of thought leaders, and recognise achievements. Our intention is to make Process Edge a reliable and robust platform, for thinkers, practitioners, and industry leaders to share new concepts and stories.
“Don’t fix that ain’t broke”. We have heard this so many times. Maybe the time now is to break and rebuild that which has not broken for a while – but for the sake of the country – rise from the inertia of not doing anything!
Table of Contents
COVER STORY: RISING ABOVE INERTIA
Making BP a Strategy & Culture for ‘Evolutionary’ Advantage
4th SHARED SERVICES & BPM CONCLAVE: A SNAPSHOT
BPM is now a necessity, No more a Choice!
EXPERIMENTATION TO FORMULATION
Quest for Process Excellence at Dr Reddy’s
TRANSFORMATION HIGHWAY
Converting Staff Functions into Value Streams – 10 Axioms for Execution Excellence
SKY IS THE LIMIT
A Case Study in Customer Experience and Value Creation
A CHAMPION AND A MAGICIAN
Hallmark of a BPM Leader
SHARED SERVICE ADOPTION BY INDIAN ORGANIZATIONS
A Pioneering Survey: Highlights
ANNUAL SHARED SERVICES & BPM CONCLAVES
Practical Guide to Business Process Management – Journey From 2011 to 2014
