The CEO of Wipro?s IT services business TK Kurien says he is driving a cultural change at the company. During a recent interaction, he explained the nuances of the transformation to FE?s Goutam Das.
There are signs of change at Wipro, going by Q2 results. The restructuring must have progressed well?
The past quarter was all about execution. My own view is that as long as we remain true to our strategy, it is good in the medium to long-term. I wouldn?t get very excited about quarterly results. Everyone tends to get very positive when there is good result and depressed when there is lousy result. What we are trying to bring in is cultural change. The culture starts with execution. To some extent, we are seeing early signs of execution. The next step for us is what I call creativity. We have some time to go before that kicks in. After both creativity and execution falls in place, comes the most difficult part ? the people transformation piece. We are still in phase one.
What do you mean by people transformation?
Transformation from a mindset perspective, from a leadership perspective, imbibing the culture we want to be. Our business is about execution first. That gives us the basis for growth. We have got part of that in place. Our customer satisfaction has gone up. The challenge would be to add more value to customers.
All top tier firms are taking about adding more value and breaking away from the commoditisation parts of the IT services business. How exactly does Wipro plan to add more value?
One, who do you call in the customer organisation? It is most often the chief information officer (CIO). If you are a guy who owns a budget line and don?t have topline responsibility, your measurement is completely managed by how you manage your budget. If you under spend on budget, you are a hero. If you over spend, you are a villain. By temperament, you become a cost player. People who drive value in the enterprise are the chief marketing officer, the head of sales, the chief of operations, the CFO, the HR head. We have to call on a bunch of constituents outside the CIO. That?s the next biggest transformation we are looking at. We have to very consciously start making that change. We are not there yet. That is when we will have sustainable value change.
Does this mean that the company will tilt towards consulting kind of projects?
Consulting is a nice thing to do because it produces value for your customer. It does not produce sustainable business. Consulting, in any form, is short-term in nature. It is not consulting alone, but everything that follows it is what we have to sell. That is exactly the way we are going. It will become consulting, followed by process re-engineering, large scale application deployment, large scale process management?it?s a whole nine yards.
You often speak about how Wipro is setting the platform to become a new generation company. What would be the primary pillars?
Those are technology frameworks. Technology can change tomorrow. I wouldn?t worry too much about buzz words. The underlying theme is that technology impacts everything you do. How to harness the power of tech to create a competitive differentiator is where the cusp of the issue is. So, are we an IT company going forward? The answer is we are not. We are a tech company. A new generation tech company is going to be one that integrates tech effectively across the value chain in specific industry areas. Lot of my competitors say that package implementation grew by so much. Frankly, I don?t give those numbers.
One of your competitors dropped the word ?technology? from their name. Some IT firms no longer want to be seen as a tech company??
In my view, it is a big mistake. Technology is at the core of what the future is going to be about. Every company has its own strategy. For us, technology will be the core. How you take technology and humanise it, consumerise it, variablise it ? that?s where the cusp of the solution lies. I think it would be a big mistake to dismiss technology.?