13 Jun LINGUISTIC ISSUES IN THE EUROPEAN MARKET
Read the article and reflect the following topics:
– Define a “cultural learning curve”
– Linguistic issues in the European market
– Ways to reduce the cultural gap
A growing opportunity to close the cultural gap
Indian outsourcing companies now have a large share of the US and UK IT (information technology) services markets, but Indian and Asian companies have found it harder to make headway in northern and central Europe. The reasons are as likely to be cultural as technical. Indian IT services companies can provide large numbers of skilled graduates with good English. However, far fewer Indian graduates speak good German, and Indian businesses are less experienced in the culture and business practices of mainland Europe.
‘If you look at outsourcing companies in India or Malaysia, they have gained their experience from dealing with UK or US businesses,’ suggests Simon Evans, a managing consultant in the IT group at PA Consulting in London. ‘US companies operate in a really very different way to the way German companies operate. There is a huge cultural learning curve for the Indian or Malaysian company to go through, even if they can learn the language.’
This cultural gap and growing pressure on companies in Germany in particular to cut costs, presents an opportunity for eastern European contractors. When it comes to IT skills in depth, India still has the edge, and IT services companies in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic cannot compete on cost alone with India, Malaysia or China. However, the high standard of general education in eastern Europe, and a healthy supply of graduates with both languages and business experience, means that the region is attracting interest both among the large outsourcing providers, and among their customers.
In Latvia, for example, there is a significant pool of experienced IT professionals – particularly in research institutes – and IT graduates, says Valdis Lokenbahs, President of DATI Group, the country’s largest IT services provider to the western market. Latvia’s location is an advantage in itself and an opportunity to combine eastern and western business cultures, he says. Its IT experts can also work in several European languages. ‘In the European market, language skills are an issue, in particular in tasks where employees deal directly
with customers,’ agrees Marty Cole, global head of outsourcing at Accenture, the IT consultancy. ‘Business process outsourcing – the outsourcing of administrative and IT tasks – is growing fast.’ Accenture has a business process outsourcing centre in Prague, in the Czech Republic, where staff work in multiple languages to support customers.
Such multilingual call centres and support locations are not new: IT companies have run centralised helpdesks in Europe for at least a decade. In addition to locations such as Ireland and the Netherlands, there are now new support locations in Eastern Europe. These new offices have more than just a cost advantage: they provide business continuity services that enable a business to continue its operations as normal even if it suffers problems such as a big computer system crash. These offices are well placed to serve the emerging eastern markets, including Russia. This is important, as acting as a lower cost alternative to Irish or Dutch operations will not be enough to establish countries such as Hungary or the Czech Republic as significant players in IT services.
From the Financial Times
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