Top IT executives advise IIM-B Executive students

There are many opportunities to grab and young professionals should join teams on the edge of the domain

Be creative, get out of your comfort zone and try different organisational roles. This is the advice top executives from Indian industry had for students of the Executive Postgraduate Programme (EPGP) at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B).

A three-hour IT conclave called ‘Indian IT: Vision 2020’ was organised by the IIM-B EPGP students Friday, which featured three top executives from technology majors Infosys, iGate and Wipro, respectively.

 The discussion was moderated by Rishikesha T Krishnan, chairperson, Corporate Strategy and Policy Area at IIMB.

“We want young professionals to get out of their comfort zones. Gone are the days when you say that you managed a thousand people under you.

Size doesn’t matter now,” said Sanjay Purohit, member-executive council, senior vice-president and global head of products, platforms and solutions at Infosys.

Sean Narayanan, chief delivery officer at iGate, urged professionals to stop being generalists.

“There are many opportunities to grab and young professionals should start taking on different roles and join teams on the edge of the domain. It is about smaller, deeper pockets of domain knowledge,” Narayanan said.

Addressing a large section of engineering graduates, who worked in the IT industry before joining the EPGP, Narayanan said graduates are given 3-4 months training on-the-job as their skills are ambiguous.

“We have to do this as educational institutions

are teaching hardcore engineering. The skill requirement of the future of quite different from what our project managers and delivery officers possess and I’m afraid the industry is doing little to help the talent pool in colleges,” Narayanan added. 

“So far, we have been fulfilling demands. But today, we need to create demand, so we need more people to create demand by taking risks in whatever functions they are performing,” said Jyotirmay Datta, global head of medical devices at Wipro.

“We had a scintillating decade of growth, which is behind us now. We need to think of what we can do to take our $100 billion Indian industry at 20 per cent growth by 2020,” Datta added.

‘Interesting Crossroads’

Narayanan said the Indian IT industry is at “interesting crossroads” and added that the burgeoning mobile and cloud platforms could give companies the required leapfrog. “The strength of Indian service companies in the last two decades have been their ability to innovate with good sourcing, costing and delivery models. The challenge is that we have not been able to build the front-end models like the very large IT companies,” he said. Emphasising on the importance of creating intellectual property (IP), Purohit said cost-per-employee in the Indian industry is destined to go up. “The game is headed towards depth in competency.”

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