Building technical consultancy skills in an IT services company

Abstract

The Indian IT services companies face a tremendous challenge in growing their verticals to address the R and D services market. The climb up the value chain is really steep and~. . ~they find it very difficult to take up the core development work. There are various reasons for this and one of them is the lack of in-depth knowledge of either the technology or the business. This is aggravated by the fact that the knowledge is scattered across various projects and resides mainly with the individual. There also seems to be a problem with the technical stream as there exists no stable position that an individual can aspire to get at as roles depend on the customer project at that time. This leads to frustration and attrition in the people who want to remain in the technical stream, further depleting the scarce technical know how of the company. This study is aimed at creating a model which will try to address some of the problems mentioned above. The project will look at identifying potential sources from where competencies can be acquired and pooled together so that the competencies can be used more effectively. The model will also try to address the problem of having a technical career independent of customer projects which can in turn lead to higher motivation and enrichment of the technical competencies.