Ashwin Adarkar is the ‘outsourcing champion’ at IndyMac Bank. He has a vast portfolio at the bank, 25% of which is global resources — including all of the bank’s offshore outsourcing initiatives such as IT-application development, mortgage processing and analytics.
Adarkar was a natural fit as IndyMac’s global-services leader. He has the knowledge of the financial-services domain, an understanding of outsourcing, and the experience of working in India, which few U.S. executives posess. Adarkar came to IndyMac after spending many years as a partner at McKinsey, where he ran its global BPO and financial-institutions’ practices, and also helped set up the firm’s India office. At McKinsey’s India practice, he worked with clients that were looking to attract outsourced work, while at the U.S. practice he was involved in helping clients with offshore decisions. One of his early clients was a life-sciences’ company, the R&D work of which he helped move overseas. Moreover, he spent five years working in India, which gave him the confidence of doing business in a country outside the experience of most U.S. corporate executives.
While it’s not unusual for U.S. companies to offer global-services-leadership positions to executives of Indian heritage (typically ones who immigrated years ago), the skills that these executives (of any ethnicity) are developing are not yet a commodity. Yet, there’s little evidence that global-sourcing skills are compensated as a “hot skill.” A skill would be hot if it were in demand and warranted extra pay. With offshoring and global business expansion becoming a more common business strategy, no one questions the rising demand for managers with global-sourcing skills. However, experts predict that it will be a few years before companies without offshore operations will actively start competing for such talent.
Success Stories
While Adarkar’s career took him from a consulting firm to a customer company, another McKinsey partner, Neeraj Bhargava, has had a career path that has taken him from consulting to private equity to being a service provider of outsourced services. At McKinsey Bhargava co-authored the first McKinsey-Nasscom report in 1999, which catalyzed the rapid growth of the offshore BPO industry in India. He also played a key role in the setting up of the McKinsey Knowledge Center, McKinsey’s shared-services unit for research, in India. He went on to a private-equity firm, Warburg Pincus, as entrepreneur-in-residence for WNS Global Services, an offshore BPO company. Today WNS is India’s leading BPO company, and has Bhargava as its CEO.
Another professional who carries global-sourcing experience from both the customer and service-provider sides of outsourcing is Venkatesh Roddam. As Global Head–Securities and Custody Operations and Global Head–Corporate Trust and Agency Services Operations at Deutsche Bank, Roddam played a key role in moving two of the bank’s processes offshore. In one initiative, he migrated the securities’ process from continental Europe to captive units in Mumbai, India, while in the other, he moved the corporate trust operations from the U.S.A. and Europe, to a third-party service provider in Bangalore, India. Two years after leading this offshoring initiative from Frankfurt, Roddam found himself in Hyderabad, India as the head of Nipuna, the BPO arm of Satyam, a $1 billion provider of IT services. Roddam brings not only the experience of offshoring, but also proprietary relationships from the financial-services world to Nipuna.
Having worked in firms representing different sides of global services — at customer companies, service providers, consulting firms and private-equity firms — Roddam, Adarkar and Bhargava have skill sets that will probably gain in value in the near future.
“Finding experience from both sides of the table is very challenging,” says Roddam. “I don’t know too many people who have done it from both sides. You find either-or skills.”
The supply of such skills is short; demand is not. In the early days of offshore outsourcing, projects were easy to manage because they were discrete, well defined and small in size. Now, with multiple projects being done through captive, third-party and hybrid models in an offshore environment, there is a need for many people from the customer side. It is only recently that companies have begun to set up separate offices for the outsourcing and offshoring functions.
There are various names for these offices, the most common one being PMO — Program Management Office. But there are also formal or informal groups in corporations called global resources, global strategic sourcing office, outsourcing center, even global business services. Dell, Bank One, Bank of America and IndyMac are among the firms that have these type of groups. The titles of executives or directors in these groups are also non-standard; in some instances you may encounter titles such as Sourcing Manager and President-Sourcing.
Still, the number of jobs that demand global-sourcing skill sets are increasing rapidly. “If each Fortune 500 company needs five such people, you can see that the demand is huge. Today there is a churn in the industry, which will take years to settle. Outsourcing is growing at 5% plus a year while offshoring is growing at 30% plus. This means there is a demand for global-outsourcing skills,” says Atul Khosla, ex-Country Head, India, Everest Group, an outsourcing advisory firm. The role of liaison that a sourcing manager plays between the business-unit head and outsourcer is critical to a successful relationship, but not yet well understood by those that conjure up compensation packages.
