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The Sleeping Goliath

The sunshine sector of the Indian economy - The Services - continues to dazzle one and all with its shooting growth curve. Services in India's GDP increased by 21 percent
points in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, nearly 40 percent of that increase was concentrated in the 1990s. This boom was fueled largely by expanding sectors like communications, financial services, hospitality, trade and business services.

Surprisingly, in contrast to trends witnessed in China and other newly industrializing economies, the share of industry in India's GDP has remained constant during the high growth period of the 1990s, while that of services has risen astronomically. With opportunities, come challenges. Sustained growth becomes difficult to achieve, as productivity increments in the services sector are normally less robust than in the manufacturing sector.

The service sector revolves around two key pillars - People & Processes. The better the two Ps, the higher the productivity. In a nation such as ours, which is witnessing growth in service industry at such scorching pace, issues like industrial best practices, operational excellence and security take a back-seat. A myopic approach of defining business in terms of top-lines and bottom-lines shoves security in operations to the rear, but this costs us in the long run. Security sensitive industries such as IT, Hospitality, Banking and Insurance have, thus, started sensitizing their workforce towards concepts like process improvement and security to meet present and future business requirements.

Security - The New Buzzword

Secure operational practices form the thin line which separates survival and extinction for industries which deal with non-tangible assets such as information or experience. Security is a serious customer concern, and if the present trends continue, it would be much worse in the future and may eventually drive out companies from the market that do not address it now.

The Indian IT industry has been riding the crest of the outsourcing wave, but incidents of security-related lapses have raised question marks about its sustained performance. Delivering quality product at cost effective price has been our core competence for long through our well-defined SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) management practices and quality control. Security, however, remains to be integrated into the SDLC to improve this process.

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Subhashini Acharya,
Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Utkal University,
Post Graduate Diploma in Management from XIM, Bhubaneswar (Batch 2006-08),
Currently, employed with TATA Corporate HR as a part of their HRDP Program.