Bottom-up innovation is paying off: Infosys’s Vishal Sikka
TNN | Jun 22, 2015, 10.39 AM IST
BENGALURU: Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka has said that the company’s Zero Distance (ZD) initiative that attempts to get employees to infuse innovation and bring improvements to every project under way in the company has made significant progress.
“This ZD initiative has become something of a movement…Projects covering more than 68k delivery colleagues at Infosys (not including BPO, consulting and products/platform teams), that is more than 70% of our delivery strength, are participating and more than 500 client conversations relating to the improvements and innovations in their projects have already happened,” Sikka wrote in the company’s blog, on the eve of its 34th AGM on Monday.
Infosys piloted the ZD initiative in a handful of projects at the beginning of the year, and the template was soon rolled out to a 1,000 projects a few weeks later. The ZD initiative equips delivery teams to embrace a new methodology, add forecasting capabilities to analytic projects or bring in DevOps (a software development methodology that emphasizes communication and collaboration) or automation into the way projects are being delivered.
“This is still very early in our innovation and ZD journey, but it is really inspiring to see. And especially the confidence we start to see in our colleagues…And it is this confidence that was the missing ingredient I saw ten months ago, the ingredient that is key to our success, our key to solving the duality of embracing automation and transcending it with our creativity,” wrote Sikka.
Sikka, who took over as the CEO of the $8.7-billion company in August last year, said one of his extraordinary early findings was the lack of initiative, lack of proactivity in the services industry. “Not only at Infosys, but everywhere. An entire industry, by and large, (d)evolved to the idea of “doing what we are told” to the point of shutting out our own ability to think, to be creative and to innovate.”
Sikka said interacting with clients only reaffirmed his findings. “Client after client spoke of the lack of proactive innovation; while they gave us high marks for quality, delivery efficiency, responsiveness and responsibility, they were equally critical of, and longed for, our help in their innovation journeys, in helping them improve, helping them tackle their strategic and important challenges.”
Sikka said he arrived at two conclusions after going deep into projects. “We work on, at any given point in time, a few tens of thousands of projects. This is the core process in the company, our lifeblood, as it were. The other was that the clients' observations were fully evident. Teams working to spec, doing what we are told, dutifully and rigorously, but almost blindly. And it was immediately clear that we needed to improve in this core function. We needed to bring innovation, deeply and fundamentally, and pervasively.”
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“This ZD initiative has become something of a movement…Projects covering more than 68k delivery colleagues at Infosys (not including BPO, consulting and products/platform teams), that is more than 70% of our delivery strength, are participating and more than 500 client conversations relating to the improvements and innovations in their projects have already happened,” Sikka wrote in the company’s blog, on the eve of its 34th AGM on Monday.
Infosys piloted the ZD initiative in a handful of projects at the beginning of the year, and the template was soon rolled out to a 1,000 projects a few weeks later. The ZD initiative equips delivery teams to embrace a new methodology, add forecasting capabilities to analytic projects or bring in DevOps (a software development methodology that emphasizes communication and collaboration) or automation into the way projects are being delivered.
“This is still very early in our innovation and ZD journey, but it is really inspiring to see. And especially the confidence we start to see in our colleagues…And it is this confidence that was the missing ingredient I saw ten months ago, the ingredient that is key to our success, our key to solving the duality of embracing automation and transcending it with our creativity,” wrote Sikka.
Sikka, who took over as the CEO of the $8.7-billion company in August last year, said one of his extraordinary early findings was the lack of initiative, lack of proactivity in the services industry. “Not only at Infosys, but everywhere. An entire industry, by and large, (d)evolved to the idea of “doing what we are told” to the point of shutting out our own ability to think, to be creative and to innovate.”
Sikka said interacting with clients only reaffirmed his findings. “Client after client spoke of the lack of proactive innovation; while they gave us high marks for quality, delivery efficiency, responsiveness and responsibility, they were equally critical of, and longed for, our help in their innovation journeys, in helping them improve, helping them tackle their strategic and important challenges.”
Sikka said he arrived at two conclusions after going deep into projects. “We work on, at any given point in time, a few tens of thousands of projects. This is the core process in the company, our lifeblood, as it were. The other was that the clients' observations were fully evident. Teams working to spec, doing what we are told, dutifully and rigorously, but almost blindly. And it was immediately clear that we needed to improve in this core function. We needed to bring innovation, deeply and fundamentally, and pervasively.”
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