Asian Technology On The Road To 'Maker' Status At IFS Sri Lanka - Forbes

IFS Sri Lanka employees: female staff numbers strong in developer/programmer roles.IFS

Asia’s technology industry has traditionally (almost stereotypically) become known for its outsourcing capabilities. More specifically, India has outstripped even China (Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are also strong) in the provision of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) i.e. the provision of back office business systems functions such as finance, data crunching etc. as well as the more front office functions such as customer contact center services.

Although these industries will continue to support significant contributions to the GDP of their home nations, there is also a realization that ‘building and creating’ can be better than just ‘doing’ for long term knowledge-based economic development. Without jumping continents too far, initiatives in the Middle East now exist to try and create 1-million Arab coders. This kind of realignment is happening around the developing world.

If not quite ready to be movers and shakers, the Asian IT industry at least wants to be makers.

Tea… and IT

Formerly Ceylon before independence in 1948, the south Asian island nation of Sri Lanka is rather better known for its tea, temples and tourism before its IT. One center of hard-core software programming and creation that has been established is the new developer center serving Swedish-born enterprise applications company IFS (Industrial & Financial Systems). IFS is known for its Field Service Management (FSM) software, which is used to optimize the schedule of remote workers and resources -- the company is also know for its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for asset-intensive industries.

The IFS facility in the Sri Lanka capital Colombo currently employs somewhere just over 1,100 staff, with a 60 to 40 split between males and females respectively. The country came out of its 25-year civil war in 2009 and the capital now resembles parts of China in terms of its massive new construction surge (indeed, China itself has invested heavily in this new boom). But, interestingly, the IFS operation was established some 21 years ago this year, so the company either had faith, visionary clairvoyance… or both.

Domain experts

What makes the IFS facility (arguably) interesting is the fact that it houses developers, programmers and all the normal flavors or software engineering professional that we would expect to find in the west or any other more developed economy. As what might be argued to be a sort of validation of their skills, some of the IFS Sri Lankan team have now been posted overseas in Europe and North American in cases where the employee has become ‘the domain expert’ in their particular field. So how did this maker (not just do-er) operation come about in the first place?

“We were looking for a new development center back in 1997, one that was high value, obviously… but also one that that gave us access to really sharp talent coming out of good universities,” said IFS senior vice president of research and development, Thomas Säld. “I would also say that Sri Lanka has a special work mentality. People are very dedicated; and this was important to us because we needed a low attrition rate. Global ERP software systems programming is pretty complex, so once you train people up you need to be able to go forward in the knowledge that they will stay with the company for the longer term.”

Säld points out that although, yes, there is a big customer support contact center located in Sri Lanka at one of the firm’s four sites… around half (500) of the employees are programmers actually working to develop software on the core IFS platform.

“It is only when you start to co-locate development in more than one global site that you really know whether or not your programming processes are efficient or not. We could have put all our development in once place and theoretically created one very large site -- but making sure we exist in more than one place on the planet ensures that you can operate with connected methodologies. What is more, it also ensures that we have more diversity in our talent pool. It helps us think about how people use our products in other parts of the world. So Sri Lanka was deliberate and we knew that we needed to be somewhere else other than where the company was initially founded, in Sweden,” said Säld.

Configuration, not customization

Across the IT industry today, there is a big push for modular solutions that come packaged in composable chunks of connected cloud, often woven together through so-called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Software vendors want customers to use as many of their platform’s connected functionalities as possible and avoid in-house customization where possible. This is because custom-crafting add-ons and extensions builds up a silo mentality… and IT silos are difficult to move, migrate, upgrade and so on. As such, a large contingent of the Sri Lanka IFS software engineering team are trained to help firms understand the breadth of the software platform itself and look for different ways of working with it.

It’s what we call configuration rather that customization -- and it takes a developer brain to be able to know the difference.

“IFS started 21 years ago with just 28 staff and [as already noted here] we now employ around 1,100,” said Ranil Rajapakse, SVP and COO head of world operations for IFS Sri Lanka. “Looking at the establishment and growth of this now considerably extended team, it has always been important for us to be part of the global IFS technology proposition. It was very important that we were never thought of as ‘offshore’, we are part of the whole company and we’re just on a different shoreline. That term offshore seems to plant something in people in peoples’ minds and that’s not the way global IT companies need to develop these days. We run operations on the concept of what I like to call global-local duality and, ultimately, I think we will help reverse the diaspora and help to attract domestically born tech talent that has emigrated back to Sri Lanka.”

Skills investment

The company claims to be pretty serious about skills investment at the university level. IFS runs software application development courses at a number of local universities and technical institutes including the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT). This effort encompasses and includes lectures, seminars, computer labs training, full coursework programme curriculum development and exams. IFS supplies these services free of charge. The company also offers around 80 scholarships for those that cannot afford to attend university in Colombo.

“The way our team in Sri Lanka is now integrated with our other development, consulting and support operations within IFS globally is of meaningful value to our customers. Regardless of where a customer is located around the world, we are able to consistently offer them the best service from the most aptly skilled experts. The differentiator in our approach compared to peers is that customers are at the center of investment decisions like this,” said IFS chief executive officer Darren Roos.

Sri Lankan economic outlook

If we think back to the information technology pre-Windows 95, we were using Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the web was only just started to bubble upwards into our collective conscience. People went to work in the office and ordered sandwiches at lunchtime. A business (or indeed leisure) trip to China, the Middle East, Africa or India seemed like a lifetime voyage and Asia (as a whole) was still known for producing the cheaper end of the mass manufacturing goods market.

A quarter century later and we’re all about the web connected cloud in an age when open source is now the cherished darling of every enterprise software vendor. Lots of us work from home (or freelance) in the new age ‘gig economy’ and we’ve all swapped sandwiches for low carb quinoa and kale smoothies. The new Asia is one with developers actually developing (look at the number of Indian engineers that have gone on to become C-suite execs in Silicon Valley) and Sri Lanka wants to be a part of that boom.

What develops next could come down to the quality of Sri Lanka’s graduate market (the country has a 92% literacy rate compared to 74% in India) and its relative size. The tea, temples, tourists and tuk tuk auto-rickshaws will always be there, but technology could be the next reason you know where Sri Lanka is.

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