Infosys Begins to Show the Signs of Strategic and Transformational Confluence

Infosys Confluence 2015 last week in San Francisco was a client, advisor and analyst focused conference that gave HfS attendees a chance to see the progress of the strategic transformation of the service provider, nine months into the leadership of Dr. Vishal Sikka.   Confluence refers to the act or process of merging and what we took away from the sessions was that while change is well underway at the top and even at the bottom of Infosys, its still just taking root in the middle of the organization in response to the overall state of flux in the IT and BPO industry, where the old labor arbitrage models that got us here are no longer sustainable as a source of future growth but yet still need to be maintained for the moment.

At the top we saw the results of a realignment of leaders and organizations to plan for growth.  The appointment of Ravi Kumar as Chief Delivery Officer out of New York (rather than Bangalore) is an opportunity for Infosys to better understand client needs and then design those into the organization.   At the top we also saw that Vishal is further taking control of the overall Infosys strategic vision and directing it towards areas of Renew (Knowledge Based IT, Knowledge Based Engineering and Pervasive Automation) as well as areas that are New (Design Thinking, Platforms and Next Generation Applications) some of which may get a boost from forthcoming acquisitions.

At the bottom of Infosys we heard about the real push to embed design thinking into the organization (with 25,000+ FTEs trained already) and the role that automation will play in changing the roles of the junior levels of the service provider.  We also heard about new platforms such as the Infosys Automation Platform and the Infosys Information Platform, which we had written about here that allow Infosys to build service sets and new businesses around in a scalable way that wasn’t there before.

Initially we didn’t hear as much though about the middle though, but in smaller sessions with Vishal and his leaders those gradually began to come out.  Such as the identification that 3,500 master project leads were key change agents and how more than 1,800 had been put through design training already in an effort to evolve the way that they collaborate, lead and respond to clients.   We also saw how Engineering Services is being positioned as a lead and a peer with IT, BPO and Infrastructure to create the new Infosys but we’d still like to hear more about how it will balance between the traditional business and as-a-service models.  

These signs of change are encouraging at Infosys but we will soon want to see examples and employee testimonials from the middle layers of the service provider as to how new and renew are changing the way Infosys interacts with clients.

Only then will we really see whether strategic and transformational confluence has been attained across the units of Infosys and across the organizational levels as well to reinforce the investments in platform and automation, which have been ahead of the industry average.  The confluence has begun but the transformation remains to be complete.