Chief operating officer of Infosys Technologies SD Shibulal is spearheading a company-wide restructuring drive that would ultimately make life easier for customers. It would sharpen the firm?s focus, make its approach more outcome-based and position it for higher growth, he tells FE?s Goutam Das.
Tell us about the genesis of restructuring. What were you aiming at?
The root of everything we do is the client. The most important thing is to be relevant to the client. Infosys 1.0 was about application development maintenance (ADM) and global delivery model (GDM) and we were very relevant to clients because GDM was new. The second phase of the company was about two parts ? the first was about end-to-end service capability.
We expanded our service lines and became relevant in more areas from being relevant only in the ADM space. The second part of 2.0 was about converting GDM to GDM plus consulting ? like doing system integration work on the GDM platform. Now, we are going to the third phase and are looking at how to strengthen our strategic partnership with clients. From a broad sense, there are three areas of interest for clients ? optimising IT and business operations, trying to transform to create differentiation and business innovation. We need to be relevant to them in all these spaces. This is where the restructuring started.
The new go-to-market is through industry verticals. How does this strategy help?
Our value comes from the combination of domain consulting and technical skills. We want to play in all the boxes ? the business operations box which clients are trying to optimise, the business transformation space and the innovation space. It is very important to align everything in front of the client ? it has to be a single Infosys. However, we have to better align our horizontals to the verticals ? you need the horizontals to build scale and capability.
Is it correct to assume that executives who head the verticals are the leaders to watch out for?
As a corporation, we have to look at things in multiple dimensions. The industry vertical dimension, we agree, is a go-to-market dimension but the offering dimension is equally important because the growth will happen in the offering.
If the execution engine is not growing and the platform on which you execute is not evolving, then execution will falter. Some of the best leaders will be taking all these positions. Business innovation is a horizontal but a growth area for us. The leader here has to be strong. I don?t think there is a trade-off one needs to choose.
What kind of a company will Infosys look like once the restructuring is complete?
It will look very much like an enterprise player. We have built strong consulting capabilities, we are an end-to-end service provider, we are focused on global trends. Our business innovation is driven by global trends. We are evolving into a true enterprise player that can compete in the world market with other enterprise players. When you compare us, you have to do it with two other enterprise players (Accenture and IBM).
Will Infosys change the way its presents quarterly results?
Reporting change in Infosys is a very long drawn process. We will have to evolve the reporting. If we are changing the reporting structure, we have to declare both the new and old reporting styles for multiple quarters. It may be a regulatory requirement, but more than that, it is an Infosys requirement.
Were there external agencies that Infosys consulted on the restructuring?
No, we had no external agency. In Infosys, it is always a consensus-based approach. Kris (CEO) has built up a consensus.