The Hindu Business Line : Nurturing change

TELLING someone to do something is one thing. Guiding them in the process of changing is something else. And this is where Wipro Infotech feels it can score. The company is bullish about customer and revenue growth from its consulting services. eWorld spoke to Dr Anurag Srivastava, Head - Consulting Services, to get a feel of what drives its offerings in this segment.

As Indian and Asian companies shift focus from efficiency, and cycle time to customer acquisition, profitability and shareholder value, Wipro says it can help. In determining and getting return on IT investments, "we not only tell customers how to do it, but bring our thought leadership to the whole change process,'' says Dr Srivastava.

"We are not just consultants but change agents - and offer thought leadership on Six Sigma and tech leadership as well as people with P-CMM capabilities," says Dr Srivastava. "These people have got their hands dirty doing the tasks and are not just sitting around throwing out suggestions at random," he says.

Wipro says it will help customers measure their business effectiveness — where performance measures do not include terms such as application uptime or network uptime. "Effectiveness is about whether you can get the right information at the right time. For instance, when the cola-pesticide residue issue broke out, top management would no longer have asked for details on manufacturing or bottling - their information needs would have changed drastically overnight. The test of a quality system would have been in its ability to deliver the right information at the right time," says Dr Srivastava. "How dynamic is the system to provide you the information you really need when you need it?''

Enterprises have made huge investments in ERP packages - how effective have these been? Not many businesses are getting the most out of these packages, says Dr Srivastava. That is not because of shortcomings in the package but because the IT has been built onto rigid processes. When information flow is not dynamic, there is bound to be less than ideal conditions of information available in the system at any given time. In most situations, organisations can lumber along. But the business environment is so dynamic that new and sudden information requirements can crop up - and organisations with rigid processes and infrastructure in place will be unable to cope.

To get business value from IT investments is a matter of concern to all businesses, says Dr Srivastava.

Wipro offers consulting services on business transformation, six sigma practices and P-CMM - organisations need these skills and "we have acquired them through our own introspective examination of our strengths," says Dr Srivastava. In fact, that was how the consulting practice was born - when Wipro took the time off to look at the return on its own IT investments and through its Six Sigma and P-CMM efforts.

The manufacturing sector is going through an export orientation and an increasing proportion of revenues for manufacturing companies is from exports. As these companies compete in a global environment, they discover the need for people and quality strategies - that is where Wipro has demonstrated value for its customers, according to Dr Srivastava.

Whether it was engineering an account-opening process for a large bank or advising the Kerala Government on how to position it as a suitable destination for healthcare BPO investments or increasing cost savings in a core production process for a steel giant, Wipro says it has the bandwidth for all.

With focus areas in the finance and banking sectors, as well as telecom in India, Asiapac and West Asia, as well as on the manufacturing sector, Wipro's consulting practice is banking on its change agents to drive growth. With a focus on technology, process and people, Wipro is betting it has got a winning prescription.

priya@thehindu.co.in

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