Opportunity in chaos: Benefits of the ITO & BPO industry in Kosovo in the face of Coronavirus

In the face of Coronavirus uncertainty, organizations face unprecedented challenges. They are working hard to mitigate the financial and operational risks that can disrupt their business continuity.

The times they are a-changin’! There are few precedents in the history of mankind for the scale and speed of change that Coronavirus pandemic has brought on industries across the world, and ITO & BPO industry is not an exception to that. Although, according to ISG, global industry’s service productivity is currently at 80% of their normal levels, we will inevitably see short-term setback in the outsourcing world. Faced with the disruption that Coronavirus has imposed in organizations across the globe, organizations are investing in their operations by accelerating digital transformation to support new resilient operational models and by imposing a more feasible cost-structure. Although weakened by the current situation, the industry is expected to grow. The NTT ‘2020 Global Managed Services Report’, based on a survey of 1,250 executives in 29 countries, said that 45% organizations will outsource more than insource in the next 18 months, with 57% citing security risks as a key challenge.

In the face of Coronavirus uncertainty, organizations face unprecedented challenges. They are working hard to mitigate the financial and operational risks that can disrupt their business continuity. These organizations face two challenges: at one hand, financial constraints from reduced business operations, and at the other, staff deficiency and insecurity and travel restrictions of FTEs. Global organizations will start looking beyond their geographical and physical locations towards low-cost countries which offer these organizations customer retention due to lower costs, available and scalable talent pool, technical expertise and end-to-end project management. For them, outsourcing eliminates the need to invest in technology and infrastructure since outsourcing companies take the responsibility of various IT and business processes and develop their own infrastructure. Moreover, you do not need a large management team but more of a key account manager who manages the outsourcing relationship.

The Deloitte CFO survey shows that 99% of CFOs have taken or intend to take measures to introduce or expand alternative working arrangements. What do they mean by ‘alternative working arrangements’? On the question of what are the changes in their strategy that will be made regarding their global delivery network after the pandemic, 22% of them have said that their strategy is to increase spending on outsourcing. Apart from financial implications, the ‘new normal’ has brought up a desperate need for flexibility and agility in workforce management so that day-to-day operations are secured and that these organizations continue to operate. In lockdown times imposed by governmental policies, businesses had to relocate their workforce to working from home, reassign staff to the most critical business operations, arrange temporary staff augmentation and quick rollout of communication and collaboration tools. This technology adoption leads to faster digital transformation with unpredicted outcomes.

By being ’forced’ to allow their delivery team to work from home during the pandemic, organizations had to make decisions on highly important and sensitive topics such as cybersecurity, usage of cloud applications, data privacy as well as service obligations, without having full visibility of the impact of these decisions. Reducing security risks is not only the biggest challenge faced by IT teams globally, it’s the top reason for service provider consideration for outsourcing partnerships. From cloud to networking, data center to security and more, breadth and depth of capability are essential to recover and restore operations and position organizations strongly for the coming years. Having a trusted, flexible and tech-savvy service provider who can support your operations from nearshore or offshore locations provides an outstanding competitive advantage. It also represents a cushion of operational safety that might serve them to gain their own competitive edge.

In times of remote work, organizations use high-quality video conferencing applications for communication and collaboration tools for working together while tending be productive as if they have been working in the same office. These tools and other applications must run on a safe and secure infrastructure. Outsourcing providers ensure that new remote working applications and critical business functions are operating without interruption, and that your organization’s network and applications are protected from attackers exploiting the uncertainty of the situation from ransomware, phishing, data leakages, hacking or insider threat. All these applications are more and more moving to the cloud as a safer and more efficient way of storing and processing data. Iaas, Saas and Paas platforms give organizations fast response and fast access to applications, simplified and easy operations, instant scalability, reduced costs and improved data-sharing and security.

The Global Business Process Outsourcing Market will grow by USD 105.49 billion during 2020-2024, according to Technavio. This growth of the industry will be translated in growth of the countries that are traditional hubs like India and the Philippines as well as emerging countries like Kosovo. Coronavirus lockdown hast started two to three months before it started in South-Eastern Europe and according to many reports, companies in Asia did not manage to handle well the disruption that has come from the pandemic. This gives an edge of preference to service provider companies in Kosovo. They have the necessary experience, maturity, equipment, infrastructure and management tools to offer outstanding quality of services at a very low cost. Adding strategic time zone and location, cultural affinity and a young and talented population, the country is not “a new kid on the block” anymore, but a serious player which is challenging other countries of the region.

The country’s service providers need to take the appropriate measures to keep up with the new developments in the industry. They need to invest in their contemporary technological infrastructure, in the professional education of the workforce and in building new partnerships as well as successfully managing existing ones. In every chaos and uncertainty, there is opportunity. Nowadays, there are challenges like inability to travel and build relationships with new customers, to close business deals and there might be a general feeling of skepticism of organizations towards outsourcing. But, as we said in the beginning, forced from the need to adapt to the new reality, organizations will invest all their time and efforts on mitigating the financial and operational risks. This represents a marvelous opportunity for Kosovar organizations who will manage to overcome all these challenges and emerge victorious in the face of all these adversities. They have gone through much harder times and much bigger challenges, didn’t they!?