As Chief Operating Officer of Infosys Technologies for the past two years, S D Shibulal has been devising strategy for future growth. While talk of his possible elevation as CEO of Infosys Technologies is doing the round, he speaks on what has been done to strengthen operations and manage risks better. Edited excerpts from an interview by Bibhu Ranjan Mishra and Pradeesh Chandran
External risks are getting unpredictable. What strategy have you have put in place to manage those? We run 5,000-6,000 programmes. But the number in the high-risk or critical category is very few. We look at risk in a very structured manner. We manage and execute the risks much better today because a couple of years before, we created a new ‘High Risk Cell’ which looks into such programmes. We also have a chief risk officer.
The internal risks? Information security is a very important thing and we have made inroads and improved this over the past few years. We have implemented many new technologies and training programmes to protect information within the company from going to the wrong set of people. We are custodians to clients’ information within our organisation.
Is there any shift within the company for operational efficiency? In 2009, when we were doing the strategy planning session, we actively and diligently looked at the client side. We believe anything we do should increase our relevancy to clients. We used that as a base principle in devising our strategy. We spent almost a year trying to figure the global trends which would impact our clients and what trends we have to leverage. Based on that, we chose seven or eight of these trends to invest on, which include digital commerce, emerging economies, smart office, sustainability, healthcare and pervasive computing.
What investment have you have made to achieve this? Our investment includes the time, effort and money in doing research, building solutions, filing IP (intellectual property claims) in these areas. For example, digital consumers is one area we are focusing on by working with our clients in co-creation of products. Many of our clients are trying to build the next generation of organisation and we are working on what we call a ‘smarter organisation’. However, as a company, 90 per cent of our focus is on execution and the remaining 10 per cent on strategy.
What have you done to improve execution? We are also looking at broadly classifying our offerings into three pillars – transformation, operation and innovation. Transformation includes operations which require business process management. We are bringing out innovations’ products, platforms and solutions. In the operational side, we are looking at pricing models which are non-effort based, based on numbers of transaction.
Have you have started implementing these? Whenever you change a model and come up with a newer one, there are so many risks associated and different in nature. We are going through a phase to achieve a long-term transformation.
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How much will it impact revenue? We have always said that we want to be the industry-leading performer. None of the basic principles are changing.
You have not been that aggressive in chasing deals in the domestic market. We have been very selective in doing so. Every company has to choose its strategy. In India, we are not focusing on the traditional servicing business but more on system integration projects. We do work in both public and private space. But percentage-wise, we expect to be an aggressive player in the government space.
You have not been able to lessen your dependency on the US market, despite trying hard? That is something we have been focusing for quite some time. Of late, the proportion of our European revenues has come down due to currency fluctuation. We are in a better situation if we derive 40-50 per cent of our revenue from the US. To achieve this, we are focusing on continental Europe, where we are not very strong, and the emerging markets such as Australia, China, Japan, Canada, the Middle East and Brazil. However, let’s not forgot the US is still the largest technology spender.
With the co-founders set for retirement in the next few years, are you heading for a leadership crisis? We started focusing on leadership development in 2001. When our leadership training centre started, we decide to create leadership in tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 categories. We now have enough people in the system (company) who can take up responsibilities.