The October results season leaves no room for doubt that there is a very real slowdown in the Indian economy with the infrastructure and capital goods companies declaring weak growth and declining order books. While IT firms have held their heads high reporting good quarter results, there is some trepidation in IT Board rooms too that the election year in US, the continuing debt crisis in Europe and the visible sluggishness in the Chinese and Indian economies can see demand problems surface towards the end of this fiscal and potentially spoil the 2012 party.

The last time we saw this situation was in 2008 and some of us took the negative mood in our key markets as an opportunity to launch new services like “Impact Sourcing” which encouraged both mature and first time outsourcers to sign up partnerships which were outcome rather than effort based. A guarantee of a ten percent improvement in operating profits or even a seven percent increase in sales thanks to better ERP implementations, customer facing solutions and e-commerce extended enterprise services proved to be the recipe for ongoing investments in IT and BPO services.

This time, we expect that a similar partnership approach will pay rich dividends and there are many new edge services that will enable customers to leverage technology better to garner increased market share in the highly competitive marketplace. Exciting developments in social media, mobility and new internet capabilities are available for exploitation and in many individual customer oriented segments like retail, hospitality and healthcare; the opportunity for Indian firms is comparable or even superior to that in the West. And in the Business to Business environment, new cloud extensions available in CRM and SCM will enable seamless exchange of information throughout the value chain and make innovative collaborations opportunities add to the top and bottom line.

Our own Transformation Consulting group at Zensar has been working on a range of collaborative opportunities with a range of customers in India and abroad to prepare organisations for cost optimization and better collaboration. One manufacturing major is setting up a comprehensive cloud based Software as a Service deployment to enable Tier 2 and Tier 3 manufacturing subcontractors to be connected to the OEMs. Enterprise collaboration, Knowledge Management and Social Media consulting are all new areas where our projects are bringing leading edge capabilities to Indian firms and much more of this will need to be done if we have to rediscover the cutting edge in manufacturing and customer relationship management as a nation through a strong focus on new market opportunities and operational excellence.

The collaboration framework that will emerge in the next two years will see the impact of IT scale from the firm through its trading partners to the customer and the community. At the organisation level, self service communities, best practice sharing and information security will be key areas of focus while trading partner focus will be on extensive design and supply chain collaboration to improve the velocity of business. Involvement of customers in co-creation of products and personalized service configuration has already begun in many segments and the open source community in the IT sector has demonstrated the power of non-employees adding value which can be expected through social media to most business verticals.

In making this transition happen from IT being an evolutionary force intended for business support to a truly transformational enabler for business change, people in the C suite will have to address the real strategy and governance issues that a serious investment in IT will entail. Too often Indian business heads have paid lip service to IT, skimping on investments and choosing the cheapest option rather than the most appropriate. A compelling Enterprise IT architecture that touches every aspect of the business can be evolved only when the potential impact of IT is fully appreciated and this will also drive business objectives for IT deployment throughout the enterprise.

Any organisation that is willing to provide this opportunity to IT to transform its fortunes in a slowdown period is entitled to ask for accountability for results. The concept of a Return on IT Investments has been discussed for decades but the time has come for consultants as well as IT Chiefs to stand and deliver. An IT scorecard for business and a business scorecard for IT will have to be reviewed on a regular basis as part of the overall governance processes of the firm. As Mr Kamath used to say during his leadership of ICICI, IT is a critical function that will deliver value if it is critical to the firm and all Indian medium and large firms should start exploring ways to make this happen!

Dr Ganesh Natarajan is Vice Chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies Ltd and a member of NASSCOM’s Chairmen’s Council.