Setting the vision for the IDC

Continuation of the story of setting up the India Development Center (IDC) after explaining how I got into it and how we decided to register with STPI instead of SEZ.

One of the things that we (myself and a long time colleague who was happy to join me in this venture) wanted to avoid was to position the IDC as a low-cost alternative and define all goals and parameters based on cost alone. My good friend Vinay Dabholkar, who runs a consulting business helping organizations to MUTVC (Moving Up The Value Chain), has already done a study of captive IDCs of MNCs. He pointed me to the Partnership Maturity Model (PMM) [1] pioneered at the Philips Innovation Campus at Bangalore, besides giving his insights on the typical problems faced by the IDCs to move out of cost-center model into an innovation center.

The PMM talks about 5 levels of maturity.

1. Resource Center: The center provide only the resources and the cost is managed on a per resource level. Differentiating attribute is the center's ability to supply resources as per the need.
2. Offshore Development Center: At this level the center manages the projects locally and the cost is managed at project level. Project Management is the key differentiating factor.
3. Center of Excellence: A this level, the center co-develops requirements in its area of excellence and starts contributing to the feature roadmap.
4. Innovation Center: At this level the center creates new product ideas and protoypes. It also owns the technology and product roadmaps.
5. Highly Valued Partner: At this level the center influences the standards, defines new areas of research and contributes towards market leadership.

This PMM gave us a great framework to articulate the vision for the center, which we sold to our management and got their buy-in. It also helped us to attract top talent and set goals for the overall center and for individuals.

Due to internal reasons we have started at Level 2 (ODC). Since all the software development happens in India, we will be skipping the Level 3 and would move to Level 4 directly. We have set ourselves a goal of one year to do so.

We see the following challenges though:

1. It is essential that Level 2 is crossed with flying colors and that the enggs are trained on the technology and products quickly. If we cannot deliver at the basic project management levels, we are doomed.

2. The market (Internet Radio) is in the developed world. If we have to influence and then own roadmaps, we need to figure out a way to remain on top of the market dynamics, sitting in Bangalore.

3. Defining what is the meaning of innovation at various levels - enggs, architects and system engineers. Once this defined coming up with supporting processes and mertices.

4. Recession. We are in the middle of unprecedented recession. Too many things happening all around on which we don't have any control. Maintaing focus and motivation in tough times are going to be a lot challenging.

We are blessed to have put in a world class team without too much effort (which typically is the biggest challenge for start-ups), thanks to our conscious effort over the years in building an eco-system that we could tap into, based on a few simple values that we stand for. Resumes continue to pour-in long after our initial hiring is completed.

In the next post, I'll talk about some of the guiding principles on which we want to base the IDC on.

[1]: Jaideep E K, Dr. Ajitabh and Ravi Raghavendra, Partnership Maturity Model: Philips Innovation Campus recipe for moving up the value chain, IMK conference on Global Competitiveness, Feb 2006.

Thank you very much,


RamP!