The Deceptive E-Face

The Internet, undoubtedly, has a global leveling effect. But there are levels… and then there are levels. With India’s booming IT services sector, I decided to click on and explore the websites of two firms that specialize in developing IT products for, and providing IT services to, banks and financial institutions.

The first IT firm is a Bangalore-based giant, one of the top-five IT firms from India. The homepage opened quickly enough. It had a few graphics but most of the information was textual. On the left side was a bar indicating the various sectors that this IT firm has domain expertise in. I clicked on Financial Services, and the page for that sector came up. Like most good IT services firms, it featured client case studies. I clicked on that link. A page opened up with links to a variety of case studies: an Investment Portal for a Large Wall Street Major, Application Architecture for an Australian Insurer, Transaction Processing System for a Leading Credit Card Franchisee, and so on. Clicking on any of these links revealed simple 1-2 paragraph text accounts: the problem faced by the client, the approach taken by the Indian IT service provider, the solution developed, and the implementation stage of the solution.

The second IT firm, based in New Bombay on the outskirts of Mumbai, claimed special expertise in banking and financial services….The homepage was graphics rich, and took a while to download. With stock pictures galore floating all over the Internet, it is easy create a “Western looking” façade… the smiling blond bespectacled Western woman, multicolor technology graphics, fancy silhouette icons, lots of color…

There was, of course, the obligatory link called “casestudies”. I clicked on it, and waited… and waited… and waited. I was using a high-speed connection at one of India’s foremost educational institutions, so I cannot blame the connection for the trickling-molasses download speed. After all, with the same connection I had nearly instant access to the homepage, the sector page, and the case studies pages of the first firm.

The second firm’s main page for case studies was also relatively graphics rich compared to the first firm’s. This “casestudies” page of the second IT firm took at least five full minutes to download.

The second firm’s IT case studies dealt with a Large Bank in West Africa, a Leading Bank in Saudi Arabia, a Leading Bank in Cyprus. The Indian Major goes after the high-profile Wall Street accounts and the Indian Minor goes after the competitively easier West African and Middle East accounts: fair enough! Clicking on the Saudi Arabian link gave lots of project details, a long list of technical platforms and languages deployed, and of course the obligatory “stock graphic” of a non-descript high-tech office setting filched from the net.

From a credibility-building perspective, the Indian IT Major giving only broad-brush accounts in its case studies while the Indian IT Minor giving a richer palette of project details makes sense. As it moves up the competitive ladder, this Indian IT Minor would also begin to skip details and move to broad-brush case study descriptions.

But the treacle-slow download of the homepage and the links within that is inexcusable. It totally punctures the mythical e-face that this Indian IT Minor is trying to create with its Western-looking graphics. It screams loudly a rather unsettling message: “I have programmers with time on their hands to create graphics-rich pages but I am not willing to invest in high-speed, high-reliability web-hosting for my corporate website!”

Yes, the Internet is a great leveler… it allows the quick creation of fantastic, modern, futuristic e-faces in the form of professional-looking websites…but it unmasks deceptive e-faces just as quickly!

Nik Dholakia

ECBMs: Commercial Missiles of Information-Age Globalization

At the height of the Cold War, people as well as political leaders in the United States and the Soviet Union worried about ICBMs: the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. From time to time, the confrontation between the two superpowers armed with these deadly weapons was eyeball-to-eyeball. To avoid such nerve-wracking state of affairs, the leaders of these nations finally decided to put in place some CBMs, or Confidence Building Measures, to defuse tensions and to minimize the accidental pushing of the bright red missile-launching button. Among the CBMs, for example, was the hotline between the White House and Kremlin.

Just as the CBMs countered political-military mistrust between ICBM-armed nations, in the Information Age there is a need for ECBMs -- Electronic Confidence Building Measures -- to counter the strangeness and suspicion of foreign commercial partners.

ECBMs include everything from multilingual websites to foreign-language proficient staff to email exchanges.

In the contemporary setting, China and India are in a race to build ECBMs. China has the long-standing advantage of 80 million overseas Chinese, often in positions of power in many of the nations China deals with. These overseas Chinese provide the "friendly local faces" in foreign lands and help build confidence. Overseas Indians play similar roles, but they are fewer in number (20 million) and not at the center of power in any significant country outside India.

With Internet and global telecommunications, however, having a "friendly local face" is no longer that important. It is much more important to have friendly "local-looking" websites, friendly and simpatico email correspondents, and friendly voices and faces at the end of audio and video linkages.

That is why Call Centers in India are sparing no expense to train their Indian employees in American, Canadian, British, or Australian accents and popular idiom. China, where things usually happen on a mega-scale, has countered by launching a program to train 100 million Chinese in English language. And businesses in the Philippines have conducted market research studies to show that American consumers at the end of a voice line are able to understand English spoken by a Filipina much better than English spoken by a Delhi girl.

Of course, this still leaves open the question of who will serve the Japanese, German or French users in their own language. The Germans, of course, have taken matters into their own hand -- in some top German firms such as Deutsche Bank, English has been mandated to be the corporate language. Germany is surprisingly turning into a nation of "pretty good English speakers".

In India, the IT industry has clearly benefited from the prevalent English language skills in India's urban centers. These skills have made access to major markets like USA and UK easy.

But Indian IT firms now need to reach out to wider markets -- in France, in Spain, in Latin America, in Japan, and even in China. The ECBMs -- the new linguistic and cultural skills -- for reaching these markets are not easily available to Indians.

In the 1950s through the 1980s, Japan created its ECBMs in the form of a thin but highly trained layer of "international managers", with consummate language and cultural skills, to act as go-between between the Japanese MNCs and their Western clients.

In the Information Age, such a strategy of "thin layer intermediation" does not work too well. Ideally, everyone in the client organization should be able to "talk to" anyone in an offshore service providing organization. If they are to continue growing their IT-enabled global services, firms in countries like India, China, and Vietnam would have to really pump up their investments and efforts in developing the appropriate ECBMs to reach diverse global markets.

Nik Dholakia