Momentum builds up on National Strategy for IT/BPO industry capacity building

The Industry Capacity Building Programme (ICBP) by the Information and Communications Technology Agency (ICTA) along with the industry and academia is bringing together top experts to devise a national strategy to propel the rapid growth of the Sri Lankan IT/BPO (Information Technology/Business Process Outsourcing) industry.

The project, which kicked off on January 24 is currently spearheading an intensive, comprehensive planning process, which would culminate in unveiling the National IT/BPO Capacity Strategy at the National IT/BPO Capacity Summit (NICS) to be held on August 31, the ICTA said.

“The key objective of the national strategy is to provide an accelerated framework for high end capacity building within the IT/BPO. The strategy is focused around building niche and focused high end competencies with a Centre of Excellence focus,” Chairman of the Technical Committee and General Manager of Virtusa Corporation, Madu Ratnayake said.

Sri Lanka is ranked 29th among the top 50 outsourcing destinations under global consulting giant, A.T. Kearney’s 2007 Global Services Location Index. This index analyzes the top 50 services locations worldwide against 41 measurements in three major categories: cost, people skills and availability, and business environment.

The three key broad objectives of the overall ICBP project are; ICT industry human resource development, industry promotion and development and creating an enabling environment for ICT industry growth.

The planning process was enriched by inputs from a comprehensive survey conducted by the MBA students of the University of Moratuwa on the global IT/BPO sector’s national strategies of certain countries. The research comprises 18 countries, which helped to understand the best practices of nations who have made IT/BPO a top priority national agenda.

The research was presented to the seven committees comprising the planning stage for the National Conference.

“The conclusion of the above study stated that Sri Lanka needs to adopt a niche strategy as opposed to competing with other emerging and established competitors by merely having a low cost skill pool comprising of conventional IT professionals. It highlighted a pertinent need to build capacity for high-end engineering and analytics based niches,” ICTA said.