Jersey City , July 6. New Jersey based management consultancy firm Inductis, Inc. (www.inductis.com) is a boutique strategic consulting firm that outsources a good part of its highskill data analytics-intensive jobs to employees in the India office. Over time, the company has seen precious tools, algorithms and programs leave with outgoing employees and client deliverables. To tackle this leakage of intellectual property and cater to demands for protection of intellectual property from new clients, Inductis has put together a team of technologists, analysts and IT support staff from its U.S. and India offices to work on a Black Box function that will let employees use the applications but not let them see how these work.

“As management consultants, we have direct and continued access to huge volumes of clients’ sensitive data and information, all of which are of large banks and credit card companies. Since we are responsible for protection of intellectual property at two levels – our own and our clients’ – our very survival depends on convincing them that their data is safe with us,” said Martin Ahrens, vice president, Methodology and Quality Assurance, Inductis, Inc.

Inductis has offices in New Jersey and New York in the U.S. and in Gurgaon, India. The company’s client contact happens in the U.S. while most of the data analytics and tool development take place in India, where the majority of its analysts and data modelers are employed.

Inductis’ main intellectual property lies in the software tools it develops. Its analysts and data modelers write programs in SAS to develop tools used in applications that require analysis of data-sets to identify trends which in turn help clients take better business decisions. Loss of intellectual property began when the company chose to write its programs such that they printed both the output and the program that generated the output. “This gave everyone direct access to our thinking,” Ahrens said.

To counter this problem, about six months ago Inductis began work on developing a Black Box function. “It is called a Black Box function because it does what it is supposed to do while remaining invisible,” said Vineet Agrwal, modeler, Inductis, Inc. “Once we are done with the Black Box, we hope to make our tools and applications like a Microsoft Word where users can create and save a doc file but do not know how the program actually works and executes the command,” he explained.

The Black Box function has two parts - Secure Access Project and Methodology Documentation. While the Secure Access Project will create a platform for employees to gain secure access to data tools, algorithms and macros that were developed earlier for clients, the Methodology Documentation will get employees to document methods used to develop the same data tools, algorithms and macros. Martin Ahrens, VP, Inductis

“The value of our work resides in our macros – which are essentially program codes written to make repetitive tasks easier and less time-consuming. Developing macros is a labor-intensive job and, if our employees can access them on an as-per-need-basis, it can increase efficiency by saving them a lot of labor. So, this makes macros a great thing to steal for disgruntled employees. As a first step, we are making our documents read-only and copy-protected. This means that people can neither change nor copy our macros on to their computers,” said Ahrens.

But then again, one of the members of the Black Box development team pointed out, if a person decides to steal information, he can even sit up at three in the morning and take pictures of the computer screen with a digital camera! So, bottom line is, if you can see it, there is a way to retain a copy of it. Then there is the risk of the entire black box function being copied. And, if that is possible, then nothing is fool-proof.

“We have imposed restrictions on the physical and electronic data that employees can take with them. But obviously, there is little it can do to prevent them from taking what they have retained in their head. So, I guess the best thing to do is minimize employee attrition,” said Ahrens. He believes that at some level, there is nothing new about employee attrition. “It is a challenge that has grown out of the outsourcing industry and we need to be realistic about it. Fifty years ago, it was the insurance industry and today, it is the outsourcing industry. It is just that electronic storage of information has made it much faster and easier to transfer and walk away with it,” he said.

Inductis’ biggest area of concern for leakage of intellectual property is its employees who get a lot of information about a particular client while working for them and then leave to join a competing firm. “And, if this competing firm has a client who is a close competitor of our client, it can make things really difficult,” said Ahrens.

The company hopes that the Black Box function it is working on will build a barrier for illicit information-sharing and make things difficult for people who are looking to just copy the codes and walk away with them.