NIIT Tech looks to 'uplift service culture'

The Noida-based company is working to make a cultural shift among its employees to provide "new ideas and more values" to clients

In line with some of its peers, mid-sized information technology (IT) services company NIIT Technologies is undertaking an internal transformation to “uplift its service culture”. Arvind Thakur, chief executive officer, NIIT Technologies, said the move would also help to align itself with the changing business environment, as clients begin to look beyond only cost advantage.

Among other things, the Noida-based company is working to make a cultural shift among its employees with a focus to provide “new ideas and more values” to clients. A few years ago, NIIT Technologies had narrowed its focus down to a few chosen business verticals.

“Cost is always important, but now clients are looking for value from the partnership. Accordingly, we need to change our mindset from doing what we are told to do, to identifying the opportunities where we can add value. So that's why there was need for a huge change in mindset or a cultural shift,” Thakur told Business Standard.

“If you look at the (IT services) industry, it has been based on manufacturing principals, where quality means conformance to requirements. Whereas ours is a services industry, where conformance to requirement is just a basic.”

Under the process, which was started at the beginning of 2013, the company has covered 30 per cent of its staff (including teams working with the company's top 10 clients) so far. The remaining employees would be covered over the next 12-18 months, Thakur said. To make this transformation affective, NIIT Technologies has hired services of thought-leader Ron Kaufman, writer of best-selling book, Uplifting services.

NIIT Technologies' move is in line with several of its competitors such as Mindtree and MphasiS, which have also set out on an internal overhaul during the past two years to ensure growth among shifting market dynamics. From being generic IT services providers, both these Bangalore-based companies chose specific business verticals to focus on, and are in the process of re-aligning their teams and functions accordingly. The two companies have also been hiring from competitors to strengthen their management teams in the new structure.

“We had done that change (of narrowing focus to fewer verticals) a little earlier. But because we have been growing well, we needed to expand our leadership to create more bandwidth. We have done that now,” Thakur said. In last August, NIIT Technologies had brought Sudhir Chaturvedi as its chief operational officer from Infosys, where he was a senior vice-president and head of financial services business unit for Americas. In his current role, Chaturvedi is responsible for global sales and delivery for technology and business services of NIIT Technologies.

At the time of Chaturvedi's appointment, NIIT Technologies had said, his induction would bring fresh perspectives and enhance leadership bandwidth for the company, as it prepares for its next phase of growth with an eye to scale business to a billion dollars annually.

“We are now beginning to see recovery in the western markets and felt there is a need to strengthen our top leadership. It was a very focused and directed search we did to make sure we get the right person,” Thakur said. “Going forward, we may re-evaluate our structures based on what we want to focus more on.”

Backed by these initiatives and improving demand environment, Thakur said, he expects 2014 to be a better year for NIIT Technologies. Additionally, in line with expectations of many of his contemporaries, Thakur expects the Indian IT services industry to grow faster in 2014, as against a year ago.