Sikka’s ‘renew and new strategy’ sets Infosys on catch-up mode

Infosys has trained 12,300 people in the design thinking discipline, part of its strategy since Vishal Sikka took over as CEO.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco, Sikka said that he was amazed at the company’s ability to train and teach people on a massive scale at its Mysuru campus, which began training in these new areas in October last year.

He took over the company seven months ago and ushered in changes that include a focus on fundamentally changing the way techies approach their job.

Sikka added that already a 21-day training programme on artificial intelligence has been conducted by Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at Berkley University and 1,200 people have been trained.

He recently roped in Sanjay Rajagopalan, former head of design at SAP, now a Senior Vice-President heading design thinking at the Bengaluru-based company. These moves by Sikka are a part of his ‘renew and new’ strategy, with which Infosys is expected to catch up with its peers, and get back to industry-leading growth and margins by the next fiscal year-end.

However, Sikka said that this approach would take a long time to bear fruit. His caution comes despite the decent momentum that the company has witnessed — both in terms of revenues and profitability — in the last two quarters.

Sikka said the company is balancing its near-term vision of maintaining margins at around 25 per cent and also looking at new opportunities.

“The challenge before the company is how it can achieve this balance,” said Kris Lakshmikanth, CEO of Headhunters India.

One of the things that Sikka is concerned about is the attitude of Infosys employees. “The mindset of employees is that of following orders, not thinking about innovation; they just dutifully follow orders to solve problems instead of focusing their creativity and imagination on finding solutions to unknown problems,” he said.

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