Software Sweatshop

An excerpt from an interesting article about Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel:

"I sat down recently with Jai Menon, the company's director of IT and innovation. He had worked in the US for IBM and Bell South before he was recruited by Bharti to return to India for this job in mid-2002. When he arrived, Menon urged the top executives to outsource all of the company's traditional information technology. He said Bharti should concentrate on creating and marketing new telecom services. Rather than farming out different technology roles to a handful of companies, though, he decided to pass everything over to one company--in this case, IBM.

That wasn't a radical departure from the normal outsourcing practice. But what came next certainly was. For the first time ever by any telecom company, Bharti opted to hand network operations over to a third party. In this case it was two parties, Nokia and Ericsson, who split the country.

Another departure from the norm: Rather than paying for services based on hours worked or some other standard method, Menon chose to pay his service providers based on his company's revenue growth. That way, as Bharti grew and demands on its service providers expanded, their compensation would increase in lock step."

Smart move by Menon. That's the type of business acumen that's required to run a globally competitive organization. Interesting how he transformed an adversarial client-vendor relationship into a symbiotic partnership. The real value of outsourcing is derived when both parties have a common goal in mind and view themselves as working towards it together.

Steven Covey's coveted interdependence at its best.