With more than 30 years of experience cutting across different streams in the IT industry, Laxman Badiga, CIO at Wipro Technologies, is an apt example of the characteristics that global CIOs must possess or imbibe, for leading their companies forward in a global world.
More a business person than a pure technocrat, Badiga has used his collective business experience to fuel growth opportunities for his company. With experience in different business functions such as HR, project management, product development, and offshore software services, Badiga understands business at a more intricate level than most of his peers in other companies. This experience ensures that the connect between business and IT is immediate.
As CIO of an IT organization that services customers across the globe with a huge number of delivery centers, the dependence on IT is huge. Challenges too are numerous, since it means understanding, adapting and tweaking business processes to handle time zone differences, cultural nuances, and the legalities involved in different countries. Badiga says that collaboration is a big focus area and the objective is to establish a seamless IT infrastructure across the company. “A lot of IT enablement is required in terms of synchronizing the time lines, making the system available to them and creating war rooms so that they can share the same space. The whole delivery mechanism is also systems-enabled. I try to ensure that everything is consistent and that the process itself becomes part of the system and everyone automatically follows it,” explains Badiga, on the need for every employee, whether sitting in Bangalore, Chennai, Latin America, or Europe, to have the same kind of access and connectivity.
Today, Badiga’s team has ensured that Wipro has gone much beyond ensuring connectivity. The communication infrastructure ensures that the firm has been able to save millions in travel-related costs, and simultaneously achieve a significant improvement in resource utilization. Thanks to technology, Wipro has been able to save close to 100 trips per year for piloted projects, with approximate savings of USD 2.5 million.
Transforming internal proof-of-concepts to services
The nature of Wipro’s business also means that Badiga’s team gets an opportunity to internally test out technologies or concepts that can become potential business opportunities. As Wipro itself is a huge organization, any successful proof of concept can be showcased as a potential service for a client. For example, remote infrastructure management, in which Wipro is a leader in the domestic market today, was first tested out internally. In an IT services business, the advantage of testing and validating new business opportunities internally is huge. “At Wipro, everybody is a CIO, and everybody is an expert,” says Badiga, emphasizing the fact that there is a huge internal knowledge pool which helps the business in fine tuning services, and taking it to a different level.
For measurement of ROI on IT initiatives, Wipro has a clear IT governance mechanism that evaluates the potential of the technology to increase agility and efficiency, while reducing costs. Technologies are evaluated keeping in mind a short term and long term perspective. For example, investments in green initiatives may accrue over a longer period of time—but the payoffs are huge.
Today, Badiga’s team is sharpening the ‘People Supply Chain’ model that involves applying best practices learned from manufacturing to people. Typically, IT professionals travel from one city to another based on the location of the project. What if these professionals could work together in a collaborative way in the form of a virtual team? This will not only improve the productivity and efficiency, since these professionals do not have to relocate, but also save a significant amount of costs incurred in travel and relocation expenses. The objective is to have the capability to tap the expertise and skills of people, wherever they are located—in small towns or in established cities, and connect them with a platform that facilitates creation of virtual teams. The impact on the industry will be huge as it will allow talent to be tapped at will, and without any geographical hindrances.
For future CIOs, Badiga has some simple advice, “Do not be just a technologist. CIOs must take active steps to learn from the business, and look at opportunities on how IT can transform the business and deliver continuous business value.”