Active Stocks
Thu Mar 28 2024 15:09:27
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 155.50 1.73%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,091.10 0.65%
  1. HDFC Bank share price
  2. 1,446.75 0.42%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 427.40 -0.14%
  1. Power Grid Corporation Of India share price
  2. 276.00 1.83%
Business News/ Industry / Infotech/  From Alan Kay to Dina Bitton: Sikka’s trusted external advisors
BackBack

From Alan Kay to Dina Bitton: Sikka’s trusted external advisors

Hearteningly for Infosys, many of the areas where the consultants are working have started bringing new business

Since taking over as CEO in August, Vishal Sikka has sought the advice of at least three consultants as Infosys battles to reverse years of underperformance. Photo: BloombergPremium
Since taking over as CEO in August, Vishal Sikka has sought the advice of at least three consultants as Infosys battles to reverse years of underperformance. Photo: Bloomberg

Bengaluru: Vishal Sikka, Infosys Ltd’s first non-founder chief executive officer (CEO), is tapping outside experts for ideas and suggestions as he attempts to revive the fortunes of India’s second largest software services firm.

Since taking over as CEO in August, Sikka has sought the advice of at least three consultants as Infosys is battling to reverse years of underperformance. Hearteningly for the 34-year-old company, many of the areas where the consultants are working, including conducting design thinking classes with clients and new technology platforms, have started bringing new business.

The Bengaluru-based company, which has been struggling to return to industry-beating growth rates and recapture the status of information technology (IT) industry bellwether, is perhaps one of the first Indian companies to have tapped outside help, according to two CEOs of rival firms that compete with Infosys.

“A significant shortcoming of Infosys in the past was being overly insular and generally not open to good ideas and advice from industry experts outside of the company," said Rod Bourgeois, founder of US-based DeepDive Equity Research, a researcher focused on the technology industry. “To the extent that Infosys is now better incorporating relevant external inputs, I think this is a meaningful sign of progress."

Sikka, 48, often discusses ideas with legendary computer science professor Alan Kay, who while working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, is credited to have designed the Dynabook—the basis for all modern day tablets and laptops. “Alan is a great teacher of mine. We have also made a donation to his institute. He is one with whom I have more of like bouncing ideas. (But) he does not do any work with Infosys," Sikka said in an interview last month.

Dina Bitton, author of TPC benchmark (Transaction Processing Performance Council), one among the many benchmarks for transaction processing and testing of online transaction processing capabilities, is advising Sikka and Infosys’s head of platforms, Abdul Razack, to help build strong technology platforms.

Erin Liman, a Palo Alto-based design thinker, is working with Infosys’s Sanjay Rajagopalan—also one of Sikka’s former SAP colleagues—in curating design thinking workshops with clients, according to one executive familiar with the matter, who declined to be named.

Stanford professor Ashish Goel, who started helping Sikka and his team in October, is helping the company design a better approach to improve engagement among its 180,000 employees.

“On the sales and consulting side, we are significantly deprived of bandwidth. It is not the same Infosys we had during the time of Nandan (Nandan Nilekani, CEO in the early 2000s) who had a deep connect with CEOs," explained Sikka.

The first step in solving a problem is perhaps recognizing there is one.

“Some companies, especially Cognizant, have world-class sales and marketing. That has created a highly competitive environment," said Sikka. “The issue which keeps me awake at night is to get that go-to market side back."

Liman, who is based in San Francisco and is also a mentor at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design or d.school, started consulting with Infosys in November.

In the last two months, Infosys has won five large deals, including two contracts that each exceed $100 million in annual revenue, thanks largely to the concept of design thinking, a user-centric problem solving approach.

Bitton, who has advised Sikka for over a decade and who started work with Infosys in October, was CEO of San Francisco-based developer of enterprise information integration software firm Callixa Inc., before it was bought by SAP in 2005.

An executive, who worked with both Bitton and Sikka at SAP, and who now runs his own consulting firm, said that Bitton helped Infosys improve the computing capability metrics of the recently launched Infosys Information Platform (IIP), an open-source data analytics platform that is currently being used by more than 100 clients of the company.

“Dina Bitton is super smart on platforms, scaling, supercomputing, and a great person to talk to about how to build the next generation," said Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research, a technology research and advisory firm.

Stanford’s Goel, who was previously a research fellow and technical adviser with Twitter, even visited Infosys’s Bengaluru office in January to see how the company is faring on the “10 shortlisted ideas" sent by employees.

All the executives mentioned in the story declined to comment, citing “client confidentiality". According to three executives familiar with this exercise, the role of these consultants is more to act as a “guiding hand" and “suggest changes" for a product or ideas. A spokeswoman for Infosys declined to share details.

Globally, CEOs across industries have often reached out to outside consultants when a company is in the midst of a turnaround.

“It is certainly common for big, relatively mature technology companies to employ outside consultants to get a fresh, external perspective. This approach is nothing new," said David B. Yoffie, Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

However, some experts such as Bourgeois of DeepDive Equity Research add a note of caution: There is a danger that none of Sikka’s advisers have “true IT services industry experience".

Nonetheless, some observers, like Lawrence I. Lerner, president of Seattle-based Lerner Consulting, said Sikka may not be a legendary CEO like Steve Jobs, but by seeking thoughts from industry experts, Sikka is playing the role of “excellent facilitator of skills".

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Varun Sood
Varun Sood is a business journalist writing on corporate affairs for the last fifteen years. He also writes a weekly newsletter, TWICH+ on the largest technology services companies. He is based in Bangalore. Varun's first book, Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions, was brought out by HarperCollins in October 2020.
Catch all the Industry News, Banking News and Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 01 Jun 2015, 12:37 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Infotech Stocks
₹1,547.25-0.6%
₹1,484.10.49%
₹4,928.750.03%
₹3,837.50.76%
₹472.21.5%
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App