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Industry Risks - The Indian Perspective

One of the biggest challenges that the Indian BPO industry is facing is how to address and cope up with certain risks, which at times are threatening the eventual existence if the industry in India.

I have used a model wherein the risks are assessed based on the severity of the risk, ease of detection, and chances of occurrence. So, a risk difficult to detect, risk with higher severity and whose chances of occurring are very high would pose the biggest threat to the industry.

To quantify it in whole, a Risk Priority Number (RPN) has been assigned to all the risks, where RPN is defined as the product of Severity (S), Occurrence (O) and Detection (D). The two major risks areas that I have focused on in this article are Socio-Political Risk and Information Security Risk.

A higher score of Severity would mean that the risk is extremely severe. A higher score of Occurrence would mean that the chance of the risk actually coming true is very high. Similarly, a high score for Detection would mean that it is difficult to detect the risk.

The two major risk areas are: -