On my current trip to India multiple Indian and multinational companies asked where we saw the future of a global delivery model headed. This caused me to reflect, and here is my formal answer: There are a number of areas where we expect to see changes that not only reflect the maturing of the market but also changes in buyer demand. Forrester expects that developments and investments will take place along four vectors.

• A continued focus on building out domain and technology centers of excellence.To date, these activities have been fairly isolated to one or two technologies like SAP or the mainframe and one or two top verticals. That will continue to expand especially on the domain or industry side. The COEs will be required to support the greater focus on specific business process for application work and the need to build out a portfolio of solution accelerators with a high level of domain input.
• Building out a network of centers with a new wrinkle.With every day, it is becoming clearer that no single country is going to match the scale and breadth of India. In many cases, expansion had been driven by one or more clients looking to expand in a particular market like Latin America or China. Forrester believes that there will be a greater focus over the next two to three years around turning each alternative geography center into a particular center of excellence to clearly differentiate its capabilities and cost structure from the India mother ship.
• An extension of process investments into the multicenter world. The current process investments have been largely at a center-by-center level to improve an individual location’s consistency and predictability. The emphasis will now shift to the knowledge management, collaboration, and social networking tools to allow firms to tap into the COEs in the alternative geographies.
• The building out of firm’s program management capabilities. It is not by coincidence that both Accenture and Cognizant have acquired program management firms over the past month. Chandra Sekaran, Cognizant’s India president and managing director said that a key part of the firm’s ability to leverage a software factory approach was having the right program management skills not only at the client but also in the delivery network. As a result, even though these experienced resources are more expensive, it ultimately lowers the overall blended rate for accounts.