VISITING WIPRO – AN EXPERIENCE IN INNOVATIONAND OUTSOURCING

(published in IMI Newsletter of January,2007)

Professor Arya Kumar Sengupta*

The email message that I received one morning on a bright and festive day in October was one among some thirty I receive nearly everyday. It originated from one Priya Nambiar, an executive from WIPRO, someone I did not know. Inside there was an invitation to participate in a one day event titled “Executive Briefing on Innovation @ WIPRO” at Bangalore, e-signed by the Chairman of the Company, Azim Premji himself. Soon I got a call on my cell phone from Priya, confirming that invitation which had apparently gone to some twenty Academics and Innovation Leaders (as Priya defined them) from all over India. I was pleasantly surprised, and somewhat elated, that my earlier efforts at IIT Delhi as the Managing Director of its autonomous industry interface organization, the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), and the initiator of the Technology Business Incubation Unit (TBIU) there, the first of its kind in an academic institution in India, was recognized in one of the topmost Technology Companies of India and the world. I accepted the invitation, of course.The event took place in the third week of November, and we were all there at Bangalore as the guests of Azim Premji, all expenses paid. Among the delegates there were Professor D Phatak from IIT Bombay, Professor RK Arora of IIT Delhi, Professor Jajoo of IIM Ahmedabad, Professor Sadagopan of IIIT Bangalore, Professor Rajat Moona from IIT Kanpur, Dr Subramanium, DDG of NIC, Dr Gautam Bose of NIC, SR Balasubramanium from HDFC Bank, Vishnu Varshney, MD of Gujarat Venture Finance and others. It was quite a gathering, representing tons of academic excellence and professional acumen.

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*The author teaches Knowledge Management and Entrepreneurship at IMI and is the Programme Director for the 3 year part-time Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGPM) for working Executives. aksg@imi.edu_____________

WIPRO, many do not know, is a 60 year old Company. From its humble beginning as a vegetable oil manufacturing company in the 1950s, today it has become one of the world’s leading technology service providers. Its annual revenue in the last fiscal year (2005-06) was more than $ 2.4 billion ( Rs 106 billion), of which the combined IT business accounted for $ 2 b. It ranks as the third largest Tech Tigers of India, behind TCS and Infosys. Among the three, WIPRO has arguably the broadest array of Technology Services to offer, including software programming, tech systems integration, systems management, business process outsourcing, R&D outsourcing, consulting, and hardware product engineering. It employs more than 60,000 people, of which its global tech business accounts for 54000; some 14000 were added in one year last fiscal. Its clientele and technology/business collaborators ranges from some of the biggest names in the world, GM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, HSBC, SONY, Royal Dutch Shell, and GE. WIPRO has pioneered a strategy of developing expertise in a wide range of different industries, from banking to retail to manufacturing. It has presence in 45 countries, including sales offices, and centres for BPO, software and hardware development and engineering in 14 countries, all around the world, apart from its vast engineering infrastructure in India. It is ranked 7th amongst the top 100 global outsourcing firms. It is listed in the NYSE. It is truly a Transnational Company of the twenty first century.

The invited delegates of the Executive Briefing Meet at Bangalore were given a glimpse of the WIPRO’s vast and multifarious activity canvas in a succinct yet effective manner. We stayed at the WIPRO Guest House at the Sarjapur campus of the Company, that also housed its corporate office. Early in the morning all of us was driven down to their sprawling Electronic City Campus that had more than 25 office complexes where some 40000 people are engaged in Knowledge work. The ambience there was more like that of an academic or a research institution, ultra-modern, high tech, disciplined and extremely efficient. We were given presentations in the conference room, and taken to some of the research labs, the Talent Transformation facility (for corporate training) and the Global Command Centre, which is the hub of the global technology service delivery activities of WIPRO.

WIPRO began its foray into Information technology in 1980 as a traditional maker of computers , one of the first firms in India, but later diversified into software programming and electronics engineering services on hire. In 1990s, when the global competition forced many western multi-nationals resort to outsourcing their IT and business processes in a big way, WIPRO was one of the first organizations in the third world to come up with the necessary wherewithal to quickly adapt to the requirements of so-called virtual corporation. Though it started with low cost routine software programming service, today WIPRO is one of the most capable tech service outfits. It has over the years developed a strong engineering R&D capability, from designing of semi-conductor chips, to creating real time operating systems, to writing software applications, to designing of user interfaces. WIPRO often plays the role of a product integrator. When “there is a need for somebody for tying together a technology from the US, the manufacturing from China, and, perhaps, intellectual property from Israel, that’s us” At the core of WIPRO’s strategy is the transnational business concept that enjoins the Company to perform various corporate functions and types of work at locations in the world where it can be most efficient. A transnational corporation also must set up infrastructure that facilitates communication and collaboration between the far-flung outposts. A number of Indian Companies have successfully joined this bandwagon; WIPRO is one of the leaders in this game. Yet only about 3% of the $700 billion global IT outsourcing was off-shored to Indian Companies in 2006. The potential for Indian tech companies is huge, and WIPRO can be a good model for many others to follow.

There is little doubt that behind the outstanding success of WIPRO is their slavish dedication to satisfaction (more appropriately, delight) of its customers and collaborators. In recent times, WIPRO’s most abiding proposition has been on Total Outsourcing. It is a long term partnership wherein the technology service provider takes the ownership of sustaining and managing the client’s IT strategy & operation; based on a service level agreement, it is a value optimized way to ensure that the client’s IT transforms its Business. There are a large number of corporate clientele with which WIPRO has such total outsourcing relationship.The other strongest contributing factor is their obsession with innovation. Indeed, innovation has been a buzzword in WIPRO in almost all its functions from its beginning. Over the years, WIPRO’s innovation journey has covered focus on R&D and market to identifying new business opportunity, to business extension, to business transformation. It has been claimed that WIPRO has been sustaining competitive advantage and consolidating its leadership, primarily because of its thrust on the culture and spirit of innovation, for which there is an established and systematic innovation management process in place. The Innovation Initiative at WIPRO is a grassroots effort, comprising idea generation, idea incubation through to successful execution. At least 5% of the Companies revenue in the 2006 fiscal has been estimated to have come from the innovation pipeline. WIPRO aims to grow to a $ 5 billion company in the next five years, for which it is targeting at achieving breakthrough innovations and a new Quantum Innovation Programme has been launched.A notable feature in WIPRO’s HR management is its emphasis on skill and knowledge upgradation. Every WIPRO employee undergoes knowledge upgradation training at least 12 days in a year. In the present continuously changing business environment, the thrust of WIPRO is in helping people to transform themselves to a higher level of skill and evolving knowledge in new areas. A large infrastructure has been developed for such purpose, and innovatively, it is called Talent Transformation. Every year WIPRO recruits thousands of young graduates, but interestingly many of them are from the science stream rather than from management or engineering. A training programme of more than three to four months later, consisting of classroom teaching, on the job assignments and boot camp exercises, the new recruits get totally transformed into WIPRO professionals. There is also a Wipro Academy of Software Excellence (WASE), which is more like a university within a company.

A one day exposure to the WIPRO way obviously cannot really do justice to the plethora of activities the Company is engaged in. One is however impressed by the environment of professionalism, innovative spirit and unbounded enthusiasm of the WIPRO combine. The management style in WIPRO is truly expressed by its Value pronouncement, appropriately named the Spirit of WIPRO, which comprise an Intensity to Win (thrust on customer success), Acting with Sensitivity (respect for individual) and Unyielding Integrity (commitment, honesty and fairness in action). Azim Premji, the Chairman of the Company, with whom we spent an hour in the late afternoon, represents the WIPRO spirit.

Reference:

a) Power Point Presentations on Introduction to Wipro (by KS Viswanathan, CEO), Total Outsourcing (by Anand Shankaran, VP Global IT Outsourcing) and Managing Innovation (by Divakaran Mangalnath, CTO)

b) Steve Hamm, Bangalore Tigers, Tata McGraw-Hill, New Delhi, 2006