Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka eyes design, innovation in new IT services strategy

Infosys CEO has charted that a reincarnation of the company will not be interested in the services of yesterday

He has his roots in the software product industry, where productivity is not measured by billing the clients on the basis of works rendered for each hour unlike the information technology(IT) services industry. Now at helm of India’s second largest IT services company Infosys as the first non-founder chief executive officer and managing director, Vishal Sikka has clearly charted out that the reincarnated Infosys will not be interested in the ‘services of yesterday’, but something where people will be able to apply ‘design thinking’ leveraging efficiency tools such as automation and artificial intelligence.

During his little over than four months of working with Infosys, Sikka has in several occasions touched upon the way he would like the company to be transformed to the next level though the details are expected after the company’s quarterly earnings on Friday. But in his keynote address at the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, he dwelt upon a few of those aspects what he has envisioned for the company.

“…the main business of Infosys is our services. I see a tremendous opportunity to rethink the way services are done. In many ways when I took this new role, I thought about the world of services and I came to the conclusion that myself and us at Infosys, we are not interested in the services of yesterday,” said Sikka during his first ever address at Oracle OpenWorld.

“We believe that a great new thinking in services can be brought to life. We think the world of services itself can be transformed. And that transformation stems from being able to bring efficiency but also automation, artificial intelligence techniques to bear, to amplify the role of the people in the services world.”

While the IT and business process management services organizations are seen increasingly moving towards automating the processes with an aim of enhancing the efficiency and creating a leaner model, this is something also often being considered as a Rs job killer’. However, Sikka says tools like automation, artificial intelligence or natural language processing are technological innovations which are aimed at amplifying the human potentials further. He said, the same thing has happened in the past when the power loom was invented or when technology was used to a greater extent in agriculture thus resulting in green revolution couple of decades ago.

“Do you remember when the steam loom was going to make the people obsolete, the sewing machine was going to make the ‘sewers’ obsolete? This is a great advance of technology. It happens all the time, continuously. It has been going on for centuries,” he said.

“Focus on those things that are not possible for the machines to do and bring a great human revolution to life … I believe that a great services rethinking can be done around such a human revolution. But we believe also that the new kinds of services are necessary using the power of techniques like design thinking to be able to go in to new unprecedented areas … to able to do new kinds of things in new kinds of ways, to be able to explore what is interesting and to bring the power of design thinking to bear for this new types of things,” added Sikka who is widely considered as an ace technocrat.

One of the first few things he enumerated after taking charge at Infosys was to bring in a culture of innovation which can even make the mundane software coding jobs interesting and appealing. “Life is too short to focus only on the mundane,” he had said.

He had also prompted the company to engage more with the start-up communities that are seen to be coming with innovations in niche areas. Giving an example, Sikka said Infosys is now helping Clique Intelligence, a spin-off from DreamWorks Animation, to commercialise their collaboration tool which is unique because of the nature of the work in the animation industry. It is because a typical animation movie has billion of files in it which are stitched together by the employees with the help of the collaboration tools.

MAKING MOVES

• Bring in tools such as automation, artificial intelligence, robots, natural language processing
   
• Use power of techniques such as  design thinking to go in to new unprecedented areas
   
• Bring in culture of innovation
   
• Partnering with start-ups to amplify their reach