Bureaucracy in IT services companies as they grow larger is reducing customer satisfaction, said Wipro's ex-Vice-Chairman Mr Vivek Paul.

“IT services companies need a fundamental redesign. The bureaucracy is killing customer satisfaction,” said Mr Paul, who was the Vice-Chairman of Wipro from 1999 to 2005. Mr Paul, who took over after Mr Ashok Soota quit Wipro to start Mindtree, is credited with helping the company to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange and enabling it to cross the billion-dollar mark.

As a solution to bureaucracy, Mr Paul suggested that companies should adopt social media. “They should create more self-governed teams. The single biggest tool for companies is social media. But I have not seen companies do that well.”

Many of India's top IT companies continue to add people as they grow. For the quarter ended September 30, Infosys had a total strength of 1,41,822 employees, while TCS had 2,14,770 employees. Wipro's IT Services business had 1,31,730 employees.

But can bureaucracy be avoided in a large organisation? Ms Sangeeta Lala, Vice-President, TeamLease Services, said, “Companies need to have complete clarity on policies and guidelines. In any organisation, the employees who have been around for a long time know how to deal with the bureaucracy. It is principally the new employees who have a problem with bureaucracy.” She said if there was no transparency, it would ultimately get reflected in dealings with the customer.

Mr Karthik Ananth, Director, Zinnov Management Consulting, had a different take on this. “In large organisations, everything cannot be overseen by the senior management, so you need processes. The advantage is that this leads to standardisation, but the disadvantage is that this adds layers. But if people are going to be focused on the customer, I don't think that it is going to be such a major issue.”

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