Infosys 3.0 - International to local transition

Now a days many IT consultancy companies are re-organizing themselves considering the market situation and future growth trend.Big multinationals like Accenture,IBM,Capgamini have already taken a leap and established processes in such directions.

Moving from a technology solutions company to a business solutions company and proactively help customers build the enterprise of tomorrow is not easy task for a traditional Indian IT company but Infosys seems to determined as they know that this is the only area where they can use its hard working and smart workforce to compete with companies like Accenture, Capgamini and IBM.

History: Infosys started its journey in 1981 and went public in 1993. With very sound planning and strategic decisions , infosys has achieved a place in world IT services companies.During first 30 years of business, company worked on Infosys 1.0 and 2.0 model and now working towards 3.0 to be world's number 1 IT services and consultancy company with employee strength of 120000 plus headcount.

Infosys 1.0 : ( 20 years) - focus on developing and managing technology applications for customers and on building a global delivery model.
Infosys 2.0 :( 10 years ) - develop end-to-end service capabilities, systems integration capabilities, and added some consulting and innovation expertise.

During Infosys 1.0 and 2.0 , i.e in the past years it's project are categorized as :

1. Transformation projects <--- traditional business( 25% revenue) 2. Innovation projects <--- traditional business( 10% revenue) 3. Operational efficiency projects. <--- traditional business( 65% revenue) Now Focus are for Infosys 3.0 which means developing expertise in global trends like : 1. 'digital consumer' (digital products permeating all aspects of life), 'new commerce' (mobile commerce leading to extremely small transactions), 2. `healthcare economy' (healthcare becoming more preventive, affordable and inclusive) 3. 'sustainable tomorrow' (doing things in an environmentally and socially sustainable way), 4. `smarter organizations' (making organizations more adaptable, less complex), ' 5. emerging economies' (global growth concentrated in these areas) and ' 6. pervasive computing' (all devices becoming computing devices). Not only this but after success of finacle, Flypp and iEngage , now infosys is also working towards strengthening its reputation as complete 'product company' by creating 'Infosys Lab'.

The company now wants to do many more of those, as also co-create products with their customers.

Challenges :

• Establishing permanent base in smaller countries ( like middle europe,east europe and nordic ) to establish reputation of local international company. This should be on the same pattern as Accenture and IBM is doing.
• Establishing its brand among the western countries. Objective is to recruit local talent in western world and train them to become the face of Infosys in the concerned country.
• Core business consultancy ( or some called it management consultancy) requires the knowledge of :
  1. Business processes that are applicable in the client's geographical area like America,east Europe,China , Nordics. etc...
  +
  2. Innovative business/strategic solutions to improve the competitiveness of business/process efficiency.
  +
  3. The theoretical and practical business concepts applicable in client domain eg. insurance,banking,oil and gas etc.
  
  excelling in all 3 areas can only give Infosys lead or establish it as respective international competitor.

John Sculley - An impressive and realistic CEO

During an interview John Sculley - CEO of Pepsico (1977–1983) said following statements :

Difference between good manager and great managers :
JS: Really great managers want to turn one-off projects into as much of a routine process as they can. I am a project-centric leader( or good manager). I like to work on projects and solve tough problems. Whereas a really great manager will say, "How do we replicate the processes so that when a problem comes up like this again we can routinely solve it?"

JS : One of my first principles is, I only do business with friends. An the first steps of business is Trusting people.Once we are able to trust people and friendship is an outcome of that trust.

10 most common mistakes while planning a business

Planning Errors:
1. No Sound Business Idea: Without a sound idea, how will you develop your business plan? Without a plan, how will you develop a successful business idea?
2. No Business Plan: Your business plan is the core of your business. Without a solid business plan, there is no way that you will ever be able to turn your business into a successful operation.
3. No Market Research: Market research will determine the viability for your product or brand. If you don’t know your market, do you really know your business?
4. Poor Timing: There is a right time to start a new business, and a wrong time. If you roll out your business when the market is not ready for it, you may fail before you ever even get off the ground.
5. Poor Location: Location is everything for many businesses. Choosing your location is one of the most important decisions that you make when planning a business.
6. Poor Choice of Suppliers: The quality of the products and supplies that you offer is vital to the success of your business.
7. Underestimating the Competition: Every business and every concept has competition. If you do not recognise it, you are missing something important. Identify your competition before you launch your business.
8. Choosing the Wrong Type of Business: Sole proprietorship, partnership, LLC? Choosing the right business form is vital.
9. Failing to Seek Advice: It is important that you turn to successful people for advice in the planning process of your business; otherwise you will not be successful.
10. No Financial Preparedness: Simply put: If you’re not financially ready to launch your business, prepare to crash and burn.

The barefoot economist : Jean Dreze

There are three types of economists:

Academics who bury themselves in research reports,

activists who campaign hard.

And Jean Dreze kind of ...Can you give him type ?

Call Jean Dreze at Allahabad's Gobind Ballabh Pant Social Sciences Institute and chances are receptionists will not know who he is. Email the well known economist by his name and you will get the same result. That is because the Belgian-born, naturalised Indian's email user name is "jaandaraaz," the popular mispronunciation of his French name.

His email is only symbolic of the Indian identity Dreze adopted seven years ago. Since he came to India three decades ago, India's development issues have consumed Dreze in a way that not only has he done academic research on hunger, famine and its failing primary education system but also stepped out of academia in to being an activist and campaigner for these issues.

Dreze has cycled through several states, staged dharnas and mounted public interest litigations in a role that blurs the boundaries between academia and activism and stops at nothing to push the agenda of development.That Dreze is not your regular economist who buries himself in mountains of paper has been evident many times. Ganga Bhai, a tribal man from Chhattisgarh's heavily forested Surguja district, realised this in their first meeting.

The two were riding on a motorcycle through slushy, thick forest, having gone to research the area's starvation deaths in 1993. It was dark and raining, and they had lost their way. Eventually their bike skid and they fell. Dreze got up and asked Ganga Bhai to ride the bike himself so it would be easier to maneuver while he ran alongside. Dreze ran for about two kilometres in ankle-deep water before they found shelter in a potter's house.

Over the last couple of decades, Dreze has crisscrossed between being an academic who drafted the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and his activist role to ensure these policies work.

In the process, he has become a one-of-a-kind academic activist to campaign for, write, critique and fix India's welfare policies.

Dreze, 50, first came to India with his well-known economist father, Jacques Dreze. He had studied mathematical economics at the University of Essex but then moved to India for his Ph.D at the Indian Statistical Institute and with Nicholas Stern, the celebrated British economist known for writing the Stern Report on climate change.

And since he moved to Delhi, in 1979, Dreze started by living in a slum and fasting to know what the lives of people he wanted to research were like.

Dreze became known and celebrated at the Delhi School of Economics campus, where he has taught for decades, for his skinny frame, straggly beard, reticent nature and limitless energy to step out of the school and immerse himself in his research and his subjects' lives.

For instance, in a class on environment and development, Dreze talked about how he had noticed from his research in a village near Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad district that at sowing time, every farmer would wait for other farmers to sow to ensure that they timed their sowing perfectly. In this waiting game, Dreze found, sowing got delayed by two weeks and the soil dried up. Dreze had brought game theory by way of UP's farm problems to his classroom.

He became known for his research, with Amartya Sen, on hunger and development and later for co-authoring a report on the state of primary education in India's poorest states, which showed that half of all Indians could not read or write and that many schools did not have roofs or toilets.

By 2000 though, Dreze, who did not speak to Forbes India for this profile because he says he does not believe in singling out individual achievement over team effort, seems to have felt the shortcomings of a purely academic approach.

"In seminar halls in Delhi, or for that matter in London or Harvard, one hears all kinds of weird ideas that would never pass muster in an Indian village," wrote Dreze in 2002 research paper called On Research and Action.

This was after he had started working with Akal Sangharsh Samiti, a group of organisations working with drought affected people in Rajasthan.

"I discovered… that my painstakingly accumulated academic baggage was not always useful as I had expected in this venture," Dreze says, while writing about his work with the Akal Sangharsh Samiti, in that same research paper.

Even the "insights" of his well-known research on hunger and famine with Amartya Sen were "fairly obvious" to the affected people, Dreze realised.

And on the National Advisory Council, a body of experts meant to ensure the UPA government's agenda was being met, Dreze the activist seems to have married Dreze the academc.