Chennai, a prominent offshore delivery city in India, has experienced an unprecedented amount of rainfall, waterlogging and flooding the city. Services and commerce across the city have come to a screeching halt, and the central government has declared it a disaster zone. The airport is closed, and residents lack electricity, mobile access and necessary food and essential supplies.
The city’s IT hub—one of the largest in India—has been hit hard, too. HCL Technologies has more than 30 percent of its employee base in Chennai, Wipro and Mindtree approximately 15 percent and Hexaware near 40 percent. How has the flooding affected the ability of these and other service providers, as well as global in-house service centers, to continue operating and delivering services?
Ideally, companies and their customers have pre-defined disaster recovery plans in place to deal with every conceivable manmade or natural disaster. Ideally, these plans address disasters at the office, city and country level, including any scenario in which people, technology or facilities are completely or partially unavailable. Ideally, disaster recovery plans are tested with a simulated disaster at least once a year, if not more frequently. But these ideals are not often reality.
While reports claim the disaster recovery plans of Chennai-based service providers have been helpful in continuing to deliver mission-critical services to their customers, the reality is that executing on these plans in the face of the disaster has caused a great deal of stress to the employees and operations elsewhere in the country and the providers’ global delivery networks. Though everyone is working to cope with the challenges in hopes that life in Chennai will soon return to normal, the situation on the ground suggests “normal” may not return for at least two to three more weeks.
In addition to disrupting ongoing delivery, such disasters have other counter-productive impacts. Many business conferences and events have been cancelled, important meetings with customers’ foreign delegations have been postponed and, most importantly, the service providers must divert whatever time and resources they can to assist employees and their families.
The recent terrorist attack in Paris and others around the world are unfortunate reminders that disaster recovery planning is anything but an exercise in the hypothetical. Both buyers and providers of offshore services must continually revisit their business continuity agendas, ensure they include sufficient risk-mitigation plans and regularly update and test their effectiveness.
In the meantime, our thoughts and prayers are with the residents of Chennai.
About the author
Dinesh is a highly experienced and well-respected advisor in the outsourcing industry with more than 23 years of experience in management consulting and outsourcing. He works with enterprises to craft sourcing strategies, structure and negotiate complex sourcing transactions and design and implement sourcing governance organizations. Prior to joining ISG, Dinesh worked with Infosys and Accenture, where he led large transition programs and consulted on IT strategy and implementations, business process-reengineering and operational improvement programs. He is a published thought leader and a regular speaker at industry conferences. Dinesh manages the ISG India Business.
