COO Ashish Gupta:  First Said KPO.  And It Caught On

By Dj Varma

Ashish is the COO and Country Head (India) at Evalueserve. An IIT graduate, he went on to do an MBA from the Carnegie Mellon University. After a very distinguished career at McKinsey & Co,he ran his own successful business before joining Evalueserve.  Ashish spoke to Techgoss on how and where the acronym KPO was first used.  We put the following questions to him. 

Q.   What was the need to coin the acronym KPO to differentiate some services from BPO?

A. (Ashish Gupta) - There was a strong need to differentiate our services from traditional BPO services. The two business segments, KPO and BPO, are fundamentally different and the differences had to be brought to the fore. For example, the main difference between KPO and BPO is the fact that KPO is far more knowledge driven whereas BPO is far more process driven. Other differences are in:

a) The kind of people that you hire e.g. KPOs need more professionally qualified staff

b) The office environment that is required. In KPOs, the setting is much more that of a professional services firm.

c) Quality in KPO is defined in terms of the analytical rigour which actually calls for independent thinking. In the BPO world, strict adherence to the process is much needed.

Q.   Which other names/acronyms did you consider before settling on KPO?

A. Frankly, I did not think of any other names or acronyms. The coining of the term happened spontaneously.

Q.  Apparently, you first used the word KPO when in a discussion with a client.  What was the setting of that meeting?

A. Yes, this happened in a client meeting. The client was asking me about "the number of seats Evalueserve has" and "what is the design of the floor" etc. These questions are not that relevant to our business and it became clear to me that in the client''s mind we were just another BPO company. I tried telling the client that we were not a BPO company but really something else. When asked "Then what are you" I thought that since we are so knowledge driven, something to do with Knowledge would fairly represent our business model. And also since Evalueserve is so involved in the whole process of Knowledge creation, protection and monetization, Knowledge Process Outsourcing made a lot of sense.

Q.   Which was the first media group which first picked up KPO?  Or at least the first newspaper/magazine that you came across?

A. If I remember correctly, I think that NASSCOM was the first agency to pick up the term. We, in fact, wrote a research report for NASSCOM on the opportunities in this sector. In fact, this study became very popular in the media who by that time had speculated enough about the BPO sector and loved the emergence of this new sector within the industry. So a new industry sector with a similar name registered easily in their mind space, and became quite a hot topic to write and debate about.

Q.   At what point did you realize that KPO had become part of the Indian technology vocabulary?  KPO has become very popular now and is understood by everyone these days.

A. The term got ingrained in our vocabulary so effortlessly that even I did not realize that it is an acronym that I've coined only three years back. It's only when a small client from the UK told us that he really liked the term KPO; I realized that this is something that is now well known. This was about a year ago.