Leveraging Location Strategy For ICT Business
In my recent travel to USA and Europe, for the first time I deliberately toured tier 2 and tier 3 cities to review how can we leverage them for our global expansion. It did appear that there are many types of work that could be done only locally in these near shore centers due to:
- Requirements of work being done only by Nationals for Security Reasons
- Requirements of data being only visible in near shore locations for data protection issues
- Requirements of local language support in Europe and Latin America
- Requirements for Job protection for federal and state government work
- Requirements of work being in the same time zone for 24×7 critical support
- Knowledge of local laws and business practices
- Knowledge of domain requirements unique to the region
I also found out that like in any country there are specific skills available in regions and these are not uniformly available in all locations:
- There are local HUBs for Domain skills, Technology Skills, Industry Skills, Language Skills etc.
I also found out that the Cost of Living is very different in different parts of the same country and it is possible to have a better or same standard of living while getting paid much less. This includes the cost of housing, insurance, daily needs etc.
Considering all of above a strategy could be created for optimizing the workforce into two or three Global Delivery Centers in North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia pacific and Middle East to expand our Services Foot Print to deliver services which were not possible before from an India and Customer location based models as well as optimize the cost of existing services by location based strategy.
Consolidating in key locations using the above strategies would also increase the size of these global delivery locations to larger employee base, creating opportunities for Learning and development for employees as well as career growth. It would also enable the company to provide better enabling support to existing employee base.
The model will more than pay for itself in the long run.
