Infosys took journey to become 'Live Enterprise' 3 yrs ago: Nandan Nilekani

Firm's chief says Live Enterprise is an idea of how companies will be run in the future and a lot of it has come out of Infosys' own experience over the last three years

Covid-19 outbreak has tested Infosys’ resilience and its shift to being a ‘live enterprise’, said Nandan Nilekani, chairman, Infosys at a virtual launch of the book, ‘The Live Enterprise’. Nilekani also said that Live Enterprise is an idea of how companies will be run in the future and a lot of it has actually come out of Infosys’ own experience over the last three years.

Over the last three years Infosys has been on a major drive of reinventing itself “of making itself more agile, completely re-architecting its digital infrastructure, creating a very active learning platform, called as LeX and wing spanned it to our customer, creating a way for employees to interact with company digitally from wherever they are on their phones using the InyMe App and then during the pandemic using the Meridian collaboration tool. We have learnt a lot from this experience and we have taken this experience to over 1,000 clients around the world and this combined knowledge of what we learned from our own reinvention as well as applying our knowledge to other clients has all been distilled in this book,” said Nilekani.

The book ‘The Live Enterprise’ has been authored by Jeff Kavanaugh, global head of Infosys Knowledge Institute and Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer, strategic technology group, Infosys and talks about how companies and leaders can prepare and respond the disruptive digital forces. It also takes into account Infosys’ journey as a Live Enterprise as it dealt with challenges emerging from the pandemic.

Over the last decade consumer revolution has seen a lot of dramatic changes in the way technology is used, “we have seen the rise of the cloud and more and more people are migrating their applications to a combination of public and private cloud. The rise of AI and automation, platformization of digital platforms… the pandemic has demonstrated that companies cannot manage today without being digitally agile. The Pandemic also separated the companies that are digitally savvy from those that are not and we are seeing an increased rush across the world to become digital savvy,” added Nilekani.

He also shared that companies wanting to transition will need to have a roadmap and pathway to make themselves digitally native organizations. Because Infosys was already on the transformative path, when the pandemic struck it was able to respon very quickly. “We had our digital infrastructure for remote working ready though it was designed for only some number of employees, when the pandemic hit, it was just a question of scaling up and we were able to do that in a matter of days,” he said.

Infosys has been able to walk the talk on this transition as it itself underwent the journey and is now in a better position to share the same experience with its clients.

“This transformation for Infosys is a journey rather than a destination because every time we think of a new idea we want it to be part of our digital infrastructure and so we also came out with a plan that we will have a company-wide release of our digital infrastructure every six weeks. We choose six weeks because we wanted to create a company that was quick that was responsive that will deliver software in six week cycles,” said Nandan.