INDIA's TECH INDUSTRY TRANSFORMED
1986—2007
WHY THE INDUSTRY WAS AT RISK OF LOSING THE OFFSHORING MODEL
India tech only had narrow, coding-centric expertise — exactly at a time when backlash against offshoring was accelerating over lack of user and business perspectives
English speaking skills and low cost brought work to India, but these factors won't retain or grow customers without customer-centric capabilities. Read about Backlash on India's offshoring model, targeting India’s lack of user-centric design capability
MY CONTRIBUTION
Introduced and led the adoption of 3 missing customer-centric disciplines — extending engineering beyond coding
Institutionalized the 3 practices at employer organizations, while evangelizing them across India:
- Hosted India's first 7 annual national conferences, featuring Western speakers
- Pioneered India's first university course on usability engineering (part of MS Software Engineering degree), at Birla Institute of Science & Technology
- Authored US-published book and articles
- Set up tech writing practice at TCS (TCS was model for rest of Indian companies)
- Set up India's first usability practice and World's first business-centric practice at Cognizant
PHenry08@gsb.columbia.edu
© Pradeep Henry 2026