Skillset of employees has to go up, says Wipro COO

Bhanumurthy BM, President and Chief Operating Officer of Wipro, has his task cut out of getting the company back on growth path at a time when client expectations as well as rapid shifts in technology is raising questions around the business models of IT exporters. In an interview with BusinessLine , Bhanumurthy talks about how Wipro is realigning to the new norm of volatility growth and the way employees need to re-skill.

How is technology reshaping the role of IT exporters going forward?

Technology will play an important role in the future. While it was important in the past, a lot of issues were solved by making more people work on an issue. Now, the level of maturity of tech mandates that you need automation to assist in solving a problem. These tools are more cognitive and learning, which can scale at unimagined levels when compared to the past. It is like a chisel. In the past, one had to direct a chisel to do a job. Now, one can tell the chisel what to do and it will accomplish the task based on its cognitive abilities. It implies that as a techie, the skillset has to go up as complexity of work goes up.

Will tools replace the employees at some point of time?

My belief is that people who use tools will become superior in their productivity. People who do not want to use tools will find it difficult to compete at such a high levels of productivity.

From what you see, how capable is the industry to embark on this change?

The industry has done five transitions. It started off with mainframe, then client server, e-commerce, ERP and now digital. The timelines have become shorter in all these transitions but the tools have become better and problems are sharper. People have to readjust to this.

In line with that, our learning programmes offer employees various options which include learning at their own pace, chat with experts, collaborative learning through our versions of social network etc. So far, 32,000 have logged on and almost half of our one and half lakh people are skilled in digital tech.

How has this transition been?

It has been tough, some of the skills are not easy to pick up. Service design as a capability requires different mindset and hence we acquired Designit. It helped our employees learn from close quarters. Customers have started to look at speed, as compared to a 100 per cent solution. Experiment fast, learn quickly and move fast is the mantra. In the future, it will be about ‘can you show me the experience of the product that is being designed, can I experience it before it is built’ etc. To achieve this, skillset of people has to be assisted by that of bots. Also, I believe that, in future, problems will not be solved by a set of people but through large-scale collaboration, via crowdsourcing.

Can we get some clarity on whether Wipro has let go a large number of employees?

We have not laid off anybody. Like every year, non-performers have been asked to leave.

Like other companies, it is the bottom quartile of non-performers and is similar to the past.

What kind of increments did Wipro give this year?

It has been in mid-single digits across all levels in the organisation.

How do you decide what to build within and where you partner or acquire capabilities?

It is a judgment call. We decided that areas such as blockchain, cyber security will be ones where we will look at acquiring or partnering. Our Designit acquisition is a case in point. In these areas, it would have taken us more time to develop these capabilities.