infy and the art of PR!

At 5.30 am, while working out at the gym, I saw few frequent Infosys ads on CNBC and I thought that it does merit a blog here.

Infy has relentlessly worked towards branding efforts - more than any other Indian service provider. The vision that the top management has is way ahead of its peers. No wonder their media hits are way higher than its peers in the Indian service provider business.

What drove them towards this obsession with branding?

Vision:
NRN's vision as conveyed to me by their Healthcare and Lifesciences chief during a campus presentation at CMU indicated that Infy wants to leverage its deep expertise that it develops at the grassroot levels in order to deliver business solutions. Also, I could practically experience this at one of our client engagements, where the management consultants who were brought in could not provide the most optimal solution due to lack of grassroot level knowledge. Most of them suffered lack of depth.

If one has good contextual knowledge for a client then one can provide a better solution -- there's no doubt about that. This is more relevant to complex transformations than simple best practices implementations for simple transformations.

Pressure to upsell:
In the GDM or Global Delivery Model, the revenues were primarily in USD and the costs were primarily in INR. With weakness in USD against INR, there is a huge pressure on their margins. This is forcing them to upsell.

Timing is right:
The timing of ads is right - with slowdown, US businesses will require more and more of outsourcing. The businesses cannot hold on to costly US-based resources if they want to stay competitive.

Lessons learnt:

Competing on price is not the silver bullet -
This reminds me of our lecture in International business by ex-chief economist of Gulf Oil (bought by Chevron in 1984). Sustainable business requires that one must compete on the quality and not on price. This came up during the Matsushita US market-entry strategy for a specific product.

Perception issues -
No matter what high-end services are delivered by Infy, they suffered from perception issue of being "cheap" or "inexpensive". Upselling the services is difficult once this happens. I remember doing a high end work that is delivered by some of the snobbish consulting firms and charged at 5-6 times.

Manage the forex actively-
Sound International finance principles need to be deployed if you want to be a true "global player." Infy lacked in this aspect. I remember the conversations I used to have with one of our Group Manager - Infy doesn't know how to handle forex and he used to have a popular perception that - ah, they are such a large firm, they must be having experts in place. Hell no! They didn't have experts until 07 in place. This was especially true with USD tanking more than 20% against INR in less than a year. Global players such as Merck have much more complex strategies in place for forex management. If Infy wants to become a true global player, they will have to increase the sophistication to mitigate this risk!

business planning

The art of the start - check out this small demo by Palo Alto software guys -
http://www.paloalto.com/ps/bp/demo/sba/index.html#

I would blog about this topic in much more details later.

consultants and recommendations

Dilbert had a neatly outlined strip on recommendations. A software is recommended against and still gets installed causing it to be a DoA! You can check the strip here.

After checking out the strip, a few questions that linger reader's mind are :

1. How to make persuasive recommendations?
2. How to prevent political agendas from derailing your recommendations?
3. Do recommendations become negotiations? If yes, how do we negotiate?
   

Recommendations can become negotiations depending on the situation (the ones who get recommended, the ones who recommend, the political agendas of different stakeholders, etc). Consultants in advisory capacity always face such situations where the recommendations can become negotiations.

Consulting is an art and not a science. As Dr. Young taught us the psychology of audience decision making in his course on Consulting and Conflict Resolution, I recall a few of the prime points are as follows:

• Insist on using objective criteria. For instance, in case of software architecture negotiations, a good method to use is ATAM or Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method
• Focus on interests and not positions. Use data to back your interest - it could be industry reports from authoritative sources such as Gartner, Forrester, etc
  
• Like it or not, negotiation is a fact of life
• In negotiations, neither be too hard nor be too soft - use principled negotiation to get what you entitle and be good to people as well
  
• Separate people from the problem
• Invent options for mutual gains
• Use BATNA for folks who are more powerful
  
• Use negotiation jujitsu for difficult folks with dirty tricks

All of the above points are important and they work if practiced the right way. I have experienced it and recommend it to every reader of this blog.

Happy Consulting !

professional services of software products

Here's a funny depiction of professional services arm of a software product company from Dilbert.

booz allen to break up !

Check out this news here.
BAH to break up and have its consultancy services separate ! BAH generates about USD 4bn a year revenue. Given this, the firm's conservative valuations will be easily in the ball park of USD 50 bn+. The partners will have a ball in case this deal goes through.

I am trying to gauge what will Carlyle gain if they get control of these assets (which in absolute terms are - NONE! - most of the assets are intangibles). The people may or may not stick out with BAH - given the turmoil that BAH consulting will undergo with new paymasters in form of Carlyle. Also, as partnership targets of sr managers and managers will get hazed out - there may be a certain degree of attrition to face.

Having said that, Carlyle can deploy the staff and the managers in private equity related work. Their existing assets can be used for it. However, what impact they can bring is a suspect as 70% of BAH's consulting division works for the government and the dynamics in that sphere are much different than commercial sector (critical success factors are more political than merit-based).

I am not sure if this will affect BAH Consulting's ability to attract good talent from b-schools !? Time will tell...