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Lessons from Infosys’ Employee Development Program

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

While India certainly has a few world-class universities (especially in technology), its overall educational system is, to say the least, limited.

Despite these limitations, Indian and Western IT services firms have managed to build a million-person IT services industry that is the envy of the world—rapidly progressing from providing basic, low-cost services, to delivering not only world-class development capabilities, but also sophisticated business consulting and process reengineering skills.

How were these companies able to shape such a limited supply of human resources into a world-class talent development machine? By directly assisting engineering institutions and business schools and, especially, by taking over many of the educational tasks that are typically handled by educational institutions.

Although all of the major firms—both Indian and Western—are assuming similar roles, Infosys is clearly one of the leaders, both in how it partners with educational institutions and in its own employee development program.

Pre-Employment Education

Infosys’ employee development process begins well before it actually hires a person. In some cases, the process can track back to its corporate philanthropy programs, as with programs such as SPARK (one-day introductory experiences for high-school engineering students, hosted at Infosys development centers) and Catch Them Young (a two-week program in which 9th-grade students learn the basics of information technology). Through these programs, which have touched more than 320,000 students in the last 3 years, Infosys has also donated technology, including almost 1,000 PCs, to schools.

The company’s primary work with educators and students, however, focuses on colleges and universities. Its CampusConnect program, for example, helps Indian colleges develop and adapt courses and curricula that teach more “industry-relevant” skills. The company develops curricula, courseware and methodologies which are published on its CampusConnect portal. The program trains faculty to deliver these courses through activities including:

  • Bringing college student and faculty groups to Infosys centers for training and exposure to Infosys practices and technologies;
  • Funding train-the-trainer programs and two-to-three-month faculty sabbaticals on an Infosys campus; and
  • Sponsoring regional meetings and monthly Webinars to inform faculty of new developments and provide opportunities for them to communicate and establish communities among themselves.

Students who don’t have access to the program through their colleges and universities can access the CampusConnect portal themselves, where they can download and work through Infosys courses on their own. Since its launch in 2004, the program has worked with more than 6,500 faculty members in more than 500 colleges and universities, reaching more than 135,000 students.

Although the vast majority of the company’s campus outreach efforts are targeted at engineering institutions, it has smaller, more focused programs intended to reach those in other disciplines. B-school Connect, for example, is intended to help business schools create bridges between theory and actual business needs and particularly to show the critical roles that IT plays in management, such as by helping them create topics in business analysis. Project Genesis, meanwhile, is intended to help science, commerce and liberal arts majors develop analytical and communication skills required for careers in Business Process Outsourcing.

All of these university programs, not to speak of the company’s own in-house programs, also have a critical sub-theme and objective—to help students and employees develop confidence in their own abilities and to improve their ability to make contributions to their employers.

These campus programs are not specifically tuned to teaching skills that will benefit Infosys or to directly promote Infosys as an employer. This being said, however, they do provide visibility into the company and, through its engagement with institutions, helps the company attract promising students. They can also lead to internships, both domestically and internationally through the company’s InStep program. These internships often lead to full-time jobs.

The company, in fact, typically relies on its 500 CampusConnect partners for up to half its new recruits. These partner schools however, are primarily second- and third-tier colleges and universities. After all, the tier-one schools, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, with which we have become so familiar, don’t really need all that much help. Moreover, their graduates are more likely to go to graduate school, than they are to seek direct employment.

Learning the Infosys Way

Infosys begins its formal employee education process as soon as it hires a new graduate.

Each new engineer is enrolled in the company’s 23-week residential program (there is a separate, shorter program for new BPO recruits) at the company’s Mysore Development Center. All go through a basic software engineering course before being assigned to deep dives. Software engineers, for example, will typically focus on a particular application (particularly SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) or technology (Java, Mainframes, cloud, mobility and so forth). New business analysts, meanwhile, will go deep into a particular cross-industry domain (such as finance, human resources or procurement) while project managers focus on project management techniques and Infosys processes.

This, however, is only the first step in a career-long continuous education process. Roughly 95% of those who successfully complete the Mysore program are then assigned to specific groups where they begin to learn how to apply these skills to the needs of Infosys’ clients. Each employee gets regular reviews and options for different career paths. They are also required to take continuing education courses and meet defined certification criteria.

The company currently offers 1,500 such courses in each of the technologies and business domains on which the company focuses, plus a growing number of courses in soft skills, such as communications and presentations. But while most initial training focuses on technology and soft skills, they become increasingly exposed to iness-based courses, in areas such as business value and specific functional and industry processes, in their later years with the company.

In fact, each employee must meet all the milestones and complete all of the certifications required for their current roles before they can be considered eligible for a promotion. These promotions can be either vertical (more responsible positions in their current role) or lateral (such as from software engineering into consulting or technology architecture).

As expected, Infosys provides selected fast-track employees with special attention. Identified leaders are enrolled in the Infosys Leadership Institute, which provides highly customized assessment, personal development and mentoring programs. This program, however, covers only about 850 of the company’s 130,000 employees and is limited to three tiers of employees:

  • Tier One, who currently lead departments;
  • Tier Two, who are likely to lead departments in three to five years; and
  • Tier Three, who are likely to become Tier 2 employees in three to five years.

All employees, meanwhile, are encouraged to provide some contribution to India’s educational system. SPARK classes, for example, are taught by more than 10,000 Infosys volunteers in a given year. Volunteers also play key roles in Catch Them Young and other programs conducted at Infosys Development Centers. The company also helps employees who would like to make deeper commitments, as by paying 50 percent salary to those who dedicate their sabbaticals to teaching at educational institutions or working at non-profits.

As expected, the vast majority of Infosys’ efforts are dedicated directly to working with Indian schools and Indian employees. But, as I discuss in my next blog, it is expanding a number of these programs to other countries. It is also partnering with non-profit institutions and other companies to scale its programs, both in India and around the world.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Education System and Institutions, Infosys, IT Industry Role in Education, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | 1 Response »
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HP SITAS: A Growing Focus on IT-Based Business Value

Sunday, May 15th, 2011

My March 20 blog, HP Hallelujah? , asked and gave a partial answer to the question of how Hewlett-Packard could diversify from its huge reliance on hardware by building more higher value-add, more solutions-based businesses without attempting to directly position itself against more established solutions-based competitors with whom it cannot directly compete.

That blog explained one approach, by which the company is attempting to tread a fine line between commitment and incrementalism, in expanding and solidifying its traditionally limited approach to providing comprehensive IT-based solutions to its customers’ business needs, in addition to their technology needs.

One of the four primary steps (see HP Hallelujah?) the company is taking to provide more industry-focused solutions is expanding the size and capabilities of its industry-based service offerings. While it is building most of these efforts around the company’s application and business process outsourcing services, the company’s infrastructure-based Technology Services group recently announced a new set of capabilities that promises to bring a new level of business relevance to the company’s IT consulting services.

SITAS as a Business-Based Front-End to HP’s Technology Services

These new services, which HP calls Strategic IT Advisory Services, or SITAS, add six new strategy-level services to the company’s already strong technology consulting services portfolio. The most important, and for HP, the most revolutionary of these services are:

  • IT Strategy and Transformation, which assesses a client’s IT environment in the context of the company’s business needs, recommends the type of environment that will best address these needs and crafts an IT strategy and associated transformation plan;
  • Strategic Service Management, which catalogues the services an IT organization must deliver to enable the company’s business strategy, identifies an appropriate funding model for each and crafts an organizational change strategy to facilitate the delivery of business value;
  • Business Value of IT, which delineates the business value of improved business processes, analyzes the risks of improving and not improving these processes and recommends a strategy to achieve these improvements;
  • Cloud Business Readiness, which evaluates the type of services that can be most effectively delivered as a shared cloud service, assesses the potential financial savings and works with CIOs to craft a business case for presenting opportunities to business executives; and
  • Mergers and Acquisitions, where it assesses the compatibility of a target company’s platforms, crafts migration and integration strategies, validates IT-related merger assumptions and calculates the impact on the financial value of the deal.

Delivering and Selling Business/IT Alignment Value

HP Technology Consulting recognizes the quantum difference between these business/IT alignment strategy services and the deep technology-focused services that the company has traditionally delivered. It also recognizes the synergies among these different offerings and presents them as part of a broad portfolio, with the strategy services effectively offered as a front-end to its more technology-focused offerings.

This being said, it also recognizes that not all clients need or want all of these services (or are ready to entrust HP with all their business/IT alignment consulting needs). It, therefore, offers these services separately, as well as integrated into a comprehensive engagement and allows clients to choose among many different entry points into its portfolio.

It also recognizes the need for a very different type of consultant to deliver these services. Therefore, it is recruiting “senior, partner-level” consultants from Big Four-class systems integrators, training them on HP methodologies and partnering them with senior HP architects and solutions engineers. Each of these consultants has deep domain expertise, extensive understanding of and years of experience in specific industries and the ability to work with C-level executives. It has also created a dedicated global sales force to sell consulting services to HP’s 1,800 largest, most strategic global customers.

I personally find HP‘s progress in moving toward more industry-aligned value propositions and business-aligned services to be particularly gratifying. First, I, along with a number of other analysts, have been urging the company to take such actions for the last decade. (See for example, my 2010 reports, HP Goes Vertical and Addressing HP’s Industry Solutions Talent Gap). True, it is taking the company much longer than many of us had wished to take such actions and some still believe it is far too little, too late. I, however, applaud these steps (although I wish HP had begun taking them years before) and even see value in its very gradual entry into the brave new world of IT-based business value. I anxiously await its next moves.

Posted in Hewlett-Packard, IT Industry Trends | No Responses »
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Hewlett-Packard Goes Vertical

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

This blog is a brief overview of the findings of my new report  in which I interpret and detail HP’s enterprise services and industry-based go-to-market plans. My next blog will provide a similar overview of how these initiatives will change the company’s talent recruitment and development efforts.

Eighteen months ago, IT hardware giant Hewlett-Packard announced its plans to acquire IT services giant EDS in a transaction valued at $13.9 billion. For EDS, it was something of a distress sale. One may look at Hewlett-Packard’s motivation for acquiring EDS in one of three very different ways, it viewed it either:

  1. Opportunistically, as a depleted and undervalued asset that HP could resuscitate and convert into a strong revenue and profit engine;
  2. Tactically, as a relatively separately managed vehicle for supporting and generating additional revenue streams from HP’s product business; or
  3. Strategically, as the engine for transforming an IT products company into a business solutions company.

The real motivation was certainly a combination of all three.  As I discussed in my March 28 blog “The Services-Led Verticalization of the IT industry”, it is becoming increasingly apparent that HP has big plans for the acquisition. It sees it as creating a beachhead for evolving HP’s Enterprise Business Group:

  • From a horizontally-focused, engineering-centric IT products and solutions company;
  • Toward an increasingly consultative, industry-focused solutions company that helps customers envision and apply IT as a solution to pressing business needs.

Leveraging Capabilities Into Strengths

Although both companies have long had their own individual industry focuses, neither exactly dominated their respective companies. HP’s product line and the vast majority of its services capabilities were intentionally horizontal. The company’s primary goal had always been to create standardized, high-volume hardware that could be used in any industry, and to use its services organization to adapt that hardware to the needs of IT organizations and, especially, to support the products that were already in place. Its industry focuses were generally pretty limited.

Although HP did have particularly strong capabilities, and even proprietary intellectual property in Communications, Media and Entertainment (CME), and more limited capabilities in some aspects of Financial Services, Manufacturing. Energy and Public Sector, these were an exception to the company’s overwhelmingly horizontal activities.

EDS’s value proposition, meanwhile, was largely horizontal due to its history and because about two-thirds of its revenues were attributable to IT infrastructure outsourcing. This said, however, the company also had a significant application development and outsourcing business and some pockets of strength in business processing outsourcing. These translated into relatively strong industry capabilities in sectors including healthcare, insurance, transportation and defense.

EDS, meanwhile, by definition, had a services-led sales model, since its entire value proposition was based on the value its services capabilities could provide to the customer. HP’s services portfolio, in contrast, was dominated by maintenance and support services (which still account for more than 40% of HP/EDS’s combined services revenues). These and many of the company’s infrastructure consulting services were used primarily to enable and add value to the company’s product sales. The exception were some of the company’s industry consulting (as in CME and Financial Services) and application modernization capabilities, which were more likely to lead sales efforts.

The combined company’s goal is to integrate and gradually expand its industry-specific capabilities in a way that will enhance the value it can deliver to individual companies and more effectively appeal to business executives, who control growing shares of their company’s discretionary IT budgets. It is training more of its sales representatives on– and dedicating them to–specific industries and has tapped a disproportionately large number of EDS account executives to manage relations with the combined company’s 200 or so largest, most strategic enterprise accounts.

Steady as She Goes

Given the scale of the combined companies, these transformations will be a massive effort. And if not handled properly, will be incredibly disruptive to the organization and demoralizing to many of the employees who had thrived in HP’s traditional engineering-based culture.

The transformation, therefore, will be gradual and only partial. The EDS business, which has been integrated directly into the Enterprise Business unit, will initially serve as the hub of HP’s services-led sales activities and of much of the combined companies’ growing industry-specific business solutions marketing efforts. These efforts, however, will be gradually filtered into the rest of the TSG business, as through integration of a more services-led, solutions-based approach to sales, a growing integration of both HP’s and EDS’s legacy vertical marketing efforts and the creation of more industry-based intellectual property.

This leads to the next question. Where will all of HP’s industry-focused, services-based solutions talent come from? How will recruiting priorities, training efforts and career paths change? What impact will it have on both companies’ traditional corporate cultures? These questions are addressed in my next blog and report, “Addressing HP’s Industry Solutions Talent Gap.”

Posted in Hewlett-Packard, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, Vertical Strategies | No Responses »
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The Growth of Knowledge Process Outsourcing

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Over the last decade in my quarter-century career as an IT Industry analyst, I focused extensively on the outsourcing of increasingly high-level IT functions to offshore employees. I examined, for example, how offshore tasks have evolved from basic maintenance of old, centralized, Cobol-based applications to the architecting of new-generation, distributed Java and .Net-based apps and a broad range of other high-level IT functions. I examined how application outsourcing evolved into business process outsourcing, in which offshore providers not only managed increasingly sophisticated processes (as from basic call centers though comprehensive financial and supply chain processes), but also developed deep expertise in architecting and transforming entire processes to make them more secure, accurate and efficient.

Although Application Outsourcing (AO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) growth has (along with everything else in the business world) stalled over the last couple years, they promise to resume rapid growth as the recession ends and companies strive to institutionalize the efficiency gains achieved during the recession.

Emergence of KPO

However, the greater growth, and even greater workforce implications will come from a new generation of outsourcing—the outsourcing of a broad range of sophisticated knowledge-based processes in fields ranging from financial analysis and marketing management to legal research and the research and development of the newest generation of sophisticated IT, communication and pharmaceutical products. Even hip replacement and open heart surgery is now being outsourced!

This growth of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), which was originally launched on the promise of cost cutting, or “labor arbitrage”, is now being driven by something else—the rapid growth in education in emerging countries and the rapid decline in availability of developed country students majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines. It is simply becoming easier (not to speak of less expensive) to find, grow and mange such skills in emerging countries. (Note, that while the U.S. continues to lead the world in STEM PhDs, foreign-born students now account for more than half of all graduates. And since the U.S., through a combination of government policies and societal pressures, is making it increasingly difficult for foreign graduates to work in the U.S., more and more of these graduates are returning to their home countries—especially India and China—rather than contributing to the U.S. economy.

We have all seen, or at least heard of the rapid growth in offshore knowledge work:

  • Virtually all of the major financial service companies have opened offshore financial analysis centers;
  • All leading electronics and pharmaceutical companies have build large offshore research and development teams;
  • Offshore hospitals, which perform increasingly sophisticated surgeries for 15-20% of the price of domestic hospitals—with free foreign vacations thrown in—are proliferating and U.S. insurance companies are increasingly referring patients to them.

These, however, are just the most visible tip of a revolution that has begun to touch virtually every aspect of knowledge work. And while the fruits of these offshore knowledge sources were traditionally available only to those very large corporations that had the resources, skills and patience to build and manage their own offshore centers, the emergence of third-party KPO providers is rapidly democratizing the offshore knowledge processing industry, making such services available to mid-size, as well as large firms.

The Emergence of KPO Service Providers

All of the leading Indian IT providers now offer some knowledge processing services. (Tata Consulting Services, for example, offers business intelligence and performance management services, Infosys provides legal research and litigation support services and Wipro is a leader in product engineering services). A growing number of Western outsourcing providers also provide KPO services. IBM BPO/KPO offerings include a broad range of horizontal (including supply chain management) and vertical (as for banking, insurance and healthcare) offerings. So too does Accenture, with cross-industry services including financial and human resource management and industry-specific, such as Clinical Trial Management and Pharmacovigilance.

But while most of the leading outsourcers have begun to enter this field, their progress and active marketing of these offerings has—not surprisingly—slowed during the recession. As of now, the industry remains dominated by business KPO specialists. Although there are a few multi-line KPO providers, such as Outsource2India, KPO Experts and Evalueserve, the vast majority are specialists. More than 300 Indian firms already provide horizontal or industry-specific vertical services in fields including legal research and litigation support (Lexadigm), market research (Progonsys), business analytics (C-BIA) to architectural and drafting (Indovance) services.

Although the vast majority of the larger providers focus on providing business services to large or mid-sized companies, the Internet, combined with the emergence of third-party offshore service intermediaries, are now making KPO services available to very small businesses (as for Web design and accounting) and even individuals (such as for English and math tutors to personal assistants).

But, when you talk about business KPO providers, the discussion should begin with Evalueserve, one the first and largest of India’s multi-line KPO providers. My next blog (February 28 blog) will look specifically into the growth of Evalueserve and the range of services it provides. My March 7 blog will examine the implications for U.S. corporations and knowledge workers and what students and employees can do to “outsource-proof” their careers.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Trends, IT/Business Consulting/Outsourcing, IT/Software-as-a-Service, Job and Career Opportunities, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | 3 Responses »
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