Passionate about leveraging modern day technologies to solve diverse business problems, Raj is a seasoned IT leader with over two decades of experience across diverse tech functions and capabilities.

In a recent interaction with CEO Insights, Raj shared his insights pertaining to Global Capability Centers in today’s context and how they are proving advantageous to organizations. Below are the excerpts from the exclusive interview –

How are Global Capability Centers (GCCs) adding value to organizational growth?
The primary reason for organizations to come-up with the idea of GCC was to optimize costs by employing skilled manpower that costs less compared to other countries. For instance, a specific service can be availed at a much cheaper cost in countries with low manpower costs such as India, Poland or Malaysia as compared to US, UK or Japan. But with majority of the companies moving into the same country, GCCs again help the business community to standardize and optimize the entire process, enabling companies to avoid the tough competition over resources in those new countries. Additionally, GCCs bring-in the required flexibility and scalability for the organizations to be able to effectively target specific customer segments when they foray into new regions. Also, setting-up GCCs in other parts of the world enables enterprises to focus on their core competencies rather than worrying about other supporting functions such as setting-up teams in those regions. This will in turn help the organizations to have stronger revenue models by improving their service quality and enhancing their customer experiences. However, organizations must ensure that there is ample skilled talent available in the region before establishing a GCC there.

Throw some light on the impact of GCCs on the digital transformation scenario in India.
Currently, around 10-15 percent of the global working populations are based in GCCs, out of which around 50 percent are located in India. This is mainly due to the easy access to a massive pool of technically skilled talent and the humongous tech advancements that our country has been witnessing over the past two decades. While India was synonymous with IT 10-20 years ago, today, IT is acting as a cornerstone for the digital transformation happening across the globe. With the technology landscape now evolving at a much faster pace than ever before, India is perfectly positioned to make the most of the on-going 'Digital Revolution' due to easy availability of skilled IT talent and its reputation to deliver high quality solutions & services, exceeding the expectations of the global organizations. Most importantly, India now has a better understanding of integrating various technologies, processes and human

capabilities to deliver on digital technologies to ensure minimum human intervention and achieve optimized outcomes.

Suggest a few key strategies for the organizations to optimize the performance of their GCCs.
It is important for the organizations to regularly conduct strategic reviews of various processes within their GCCs, reallocate resources wherever necessary and decide whether to scale-up or scale-down any process based on the current market dynamics. Also, companies must do a detailed market research on the activities of GCCs of other organizations in the region, identify potential business opportunities and accordingly realign their business strategies.

Additionally, since the GCCs function remotely from the company's HQ, it is paramount for the organization to have stringent and well-defined metrics and KPIs to measure the performance of their GCCs across various parameters. Further, companies must ensure that constant technology adoption happens on a continuous basis across the GCCs and invest in talent development programs across those GCC so that they are able to deliver efficient business outcomes when handling newer technologies that might take birth in the future.

India now has a better understanding of integrating various technologies, processes and human capabilities to deliver on digital technologies to ensure minimum human intervention and achieve optimized outcomes.

How can the management team enhance the scalability and flexibility within the value chains through GCCs?
Firstly, business leaders must ensure that they have an effective resource optimization strategy in place so that the talent pool is being used in such a way to derive maximum productivity. Also, in today's dynamic and constantly changing business landscape, it is paramount to have a flexible workforce management plan in place to ensure that no resources - be it manpower, materials or capital - go waste. For instance, you don't have to setup an entire GCC just to cater to a project that will run for only three years. Instead, you can have external contract with third-parties to cater to such short term requirements. Additionally, GCCs play a pivotal role in helping organizations conduct pilot projects or experiment with any new technology or solution, thus facilitating hassle-free customization of products and solutions as per the market's current demands.

What are some of the emerging trends that are expected to reshape the GCC landscape in coming days?
The on-going digital transformation phenomena will continue to take massive strides over at least the next 10 years as well. Thus, I expect the more GCCs to come-up not just in tier-I cities, but tier-II & III towns as well. Also, we will witness an increasing number of companies adopting remote working models going forward to take advantage of cost arbitrage across regions like India. Additionally, going forward, I believe there will be a lot of collaborations between multinational companies, their GCCs and local partners to optimize the entire service delivery process and save operational costs.