Infosys has elevated BG Srinivas, UB Pravin Rao as presidents. The restructuring move is considered as an outcome of some recent top-level exits from the software behemoth. S Vishwanathan, Manager-Consulting, Zinnov Management Consulting, discusses on the company’s latest restructuring exercise and its intent to make the executive council more powerful.
Also Read: Infosys elevates Srinivas, Rao as presidents
Below is the edited transcript of S Vishwanathan interview on CNBC-TV 18
Q: From the looks of it do you feel that Infosys will be able to streamline growth because that seems to be on the agenda. Will this help Infosys getting back on track?
A: From the looks of it this is very good. In fact this has been doing rounds since about July timeframe. So, it was already told that Infosys is working on this restructuring. This was out in the news in July itself. Now by operational thing, what has happened is BG Srinivas gets hold of 75 percent of the business. If you look at the kind of things that have been organised under him financial services, insurance, manufacturing, etc, it is about 75 percent of the business. So, I think we know who possibly can be the next CEO.
Q: BG Srinivas could be a prospective contender rather the only contender, given the kind of exits now. So, just taking from that will this in a way help in containing the kind of exits that were happening at the top management level?
A: Yes, I think. I would say that the cause and effect were different. The top management exits were happening because Infosys was heading towards this direction.
Q: Now that they have streamlined it would they be able to contain the attrition?
A: All their marque names have moved on, except for a couple of names, I don’t see anybody even if they leave would make it to the news because essentially the senior leadership that was out there and very senior people who – now if you look at the structure what these two people are supposed to do was done by 4 or 5 people. So, they had such big leadership team now it has narrowed down to these two leaders.
So, pretty much the executive council in many ways is not as powerful as it was earlier. It has been made redundant.
It will stem attrition in the sense that if there is nobody else that could leave possibly but definitely it will stem attrition.
Q: As you said executive council had been made redundant but in October they had expanded the executive council. They had brought around 12 members in the council. Do you feel this will create some kind of confusion for the investors? Is there some kind of confusion there within the Infosys management’s mind and could this confuse investors?
A: The executive council in a way is a leadership pool that you have. At that time when Infosys was expanding it or when it was backfilling people into the roles in the executive council that is what it was doing because it had not yet announced the new structure. Now that these two presidents have been announced they will definitely create some sort of structure for resurrecting the executive council in a different form and manner which might consists of only the leaders facing the markets or facing delivery.
Today, they have got people from HR, infrastructure, quite a lot of people are out there. So, they might have a very structured and streamlined executive council post these two co-president structure.
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