Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

In the recent years, one name has often come up as a contender for the Dataquest IT Person of the Year award: that of the Indian Software Programmer. What the jury members have not been able to agree on is whether it is time yet to give the award to a nameless winner; but few have disputed the contribution made by him per se. This ever-increasing tribe has not only impacted the economy of the country significantly, it has changed the collective psyche of the Indian nationit has made us realize our potential; it has made us change our decades-old belief that our large population is a liability, not an asset. But most important of all, it has changed the way the world looked at Indiaa nation of snake charmers and mystics, which occasionally supplied some blue-collar workers. Today, if you are an Indian in any major city of the world, you are first asked if you are a computer programmer.

By unanimously deciding on Lakshmi Narayanan, the vice chairman and ex-CEO of Cognizant as the winner of the Dataquest IT Person of the Year award for 2008, the Dataquest jury panel, headed by last years winner Ajai K Chowdhry, has not just acknowledged his personal contribution to the development of Indian IT but has also recognized the contribution made by thousands of techies who have smoothly evolved into leaders; have built and nurtured hundreds of relationships, created employment opportunities for thousands, while creating billions of dollars in shareholder wealth. Narayanan, who shares his first name with his wife, is an epitome of that humble programmer who smoothly transformed himself to the role of the largest project man, before playing a strategist, an institution builder, and a leader, while establishing his credential as a visionary. And he has done that by working in just two companiesprobably providing at least one cue to the techies who want to be leaders, on what could work!

Those two companies of course are extraordinary companies. One of themTCSdefined the offshoring phenomenon, and established rules, which hundreds of firmsentrepreneurial as well as established oneshave followed since then. The otherCognizantwhich Narayanan helped build from day one, redefined some of those rules, busting the myth that you have to be headquartered and listed in India to be on top of the offshoring game. Cognizant is a case study of how to build true global companies from scratch while still being on top when it comes to business metrics such as growth and profitability.

The Formative Years
Coming from a family of engineershis father was an electronics engineer in Hindustan Aeronautics and his elder brother too is an engineertechnology ran in young Narayanans blood, even though like many Indian mothers in the 70s, his mother wanted him to be a doctor or a civil servant.

Narayanan graduated from the Bangalore University in 1974. Armed with an MSc degree in Electronics, he pursued his MBA at the IISC Department of Industrial Management. In 1976 he joined TCS as a management trainee with a salary of Rs 950, an impressive figure those days, even if not a princely sum. Even though I could not answer a question about the relationship between inflation and interest rate, I was selected in TCS, he quips, his face brightening up with nostalgia. Narayanan reserves all the positive superlatives for his first employer, even though it is a top competitor for his present company.

TCS is where his career blossomed. He not just remembers all the major projects that he worked on, he points out meticulously what he learnt from each of them. One of the first projects was with Taj Hotel, for which TCS was assigned to develop a payroll system. Pastries and biscuits used to be a major attraction when we worked in the hotel, Narayanan says with a smile. Even in those days, it was a complete collaborative culture, something that people are talking about today, he adds on a more serious note.

TCS had just about 400 people those days and the reporting structure was so flat that any delays in the execution of the project would come to the notice of FC Kohli, the founding head of TCS.

The second major project he did at TCS was for Bennett & Coleman for the automation of their classified advertising system. A major learning came in the next big project for UTI. The warrants that the company was printing for sending to its unit holders had some mistakes in certain cases. Some of those who got those warrants happened to be Members of Parliament and the issue was raised in the Parliament. Narayanan remembers his meeting with Tata Sons big honchos and UTI chairman on the issue. But at the end of the day, they could come out of the crisis.

Going back in time he gives the flavor of how codes were written in the 1970s. There were no terminals those days, we used coding sheets that went to various places and got punched and came back. Writing a simple program could take days.

The big break for Narayanan came in 1977, when he went to the US to do a project with General Motors spark plug division. He held various capacities in TCS in the US for about eighteen months and established his credentials as a skilled programmer. He even got praise from one of the CEOs of the Tata facility who referred to him as a bright young man with all the gods in his name.

The late 1970s were times when whoever went to the US stayed put. But Lakshmi chose to remain in TCS and came back to Mumbai and played various roles. He became a project manager and supervised the computerization of one of Indias largest trust fund during 1979-80. In 1983 he became the program manager at TCS and executed large IT deployments in the BFS space in the UK. In 1989, Lakshmi went to Switzerland and was instrumental in setting up TCS operations there.

This is the time when he convinced both Swissair and his bosses at TCS to get Swissairs back-office operations to India through a joint venture, AFS, which later merged with TCS. This was Indias first BPO, almost at the same time as Amex and much before British Airways and GE. Narayanan has never been credited with bringing BPO to India. For him, he did not see it as a potentially big wave but was convinced that it was a great proposition. Probably, like Columbus, he himself did not know for a long time, the far-reaching impact of his pioneering effort.

By that time, he had built his reputation as (in his own words, labeled as) a largest project man. So, when Narayanan then came back to India, he was given the charge of Tata Steel project. In 1993 he became TCS head of North Indian operations based out of Delhi.

Clearly TCS was the springboard to his career where he got both technology and managerial exposure. He travelled across Europe and understood the onsite dynamics and client requirements. His biggest strength according to him is the ability to design the project frameworks, which is critical to successful deployments. The exposure at TCS gave him the ability to understand complicated computing problems in the financial sector and gave him the deep domain expertise. In 1994 when Narayanan was leading a contended life in Delhi, he got an offer From Dun and Bradstreet Satyam Software, which later became Cognizant.

Initially Narayanan was reluctant to take the offer. But one of the former directors of Tata who had left the group persuaded him to take the offer. So in 1994 Lakshmi Narayanans 18 years of career at TCS came to an end and he joined Cognizant.

Moving Forward
Lakshmi Narayanans technical excellence made him become the CTO at Cognizant. Few CTOs have effortlessly moved to the role of CEO. While he was comfortable with technology, he was equally comfortable with handling relationships and large operations.

The challenge, hence, was not really running an organization, but to build it in a fundamentally different way that would give better value to the customers and need we say, investors?

The fundamental challenge Lakshmi faced at Cognizant was to establish it as a dependable IT company because Cognizant had to be built from scratch. That was both a challenge and opportunity. Narayanan and his predecessor Kumar Mahadeva decided that they could not afford to become another me-too.

Analysts still struggle to label Cognizant. It is the only large offshore-centric company that is not headquartered in India. While some club it with the likes of Infosys and TCS (as in SWITCH meaning Satyam Wipro Infosys TCS Cognizant and HCL), some label it as an American company. Headquartered and listed in the US, most of its employees are based in India.

The American company tag associated with us is a perception, while there is nothing wrong in being called an American company, we consider ourselves as a global company, says Narayanan. The companys first CEO was based in India, the second in the US, the third (Narayanan) in India and the current one is in the US.

The biggest challenge for Lakshmi at Cognizant was to deliver customer expectations of its US clients through its offshore development facilities in India. Scaling up the company in terms of human resources, technology expertise and creating state-of-the-art delivery centers which became the driver for the companys growth, and Lakshmi did these tasks with great expertise. Under his leadership, Cognizant created a client-centric global delivery model. He took the company through the Y2K phenomenon and charted the course post that with various IT transformation projects that Cognizant took. Cognizant also became the fastest company to achieve the $1 bn mark and it is also the first offshore IT services company to be inducted in the NASDAQ 100. Cognizant also made it to the S&P 500 index and became the Fortune 1000 company.

From a humble programmer at TCS to vice chairman at Cognizant, Lakshmi Narayanan has come a long way. At TCS, despite donning specific roles, his technical excellence acted as a proof-point of excellence and in a way epitomized the Indian talent in the IT space. His role in Cognizant brought to fore his skills in creating a company from scratch and making it into a successful enterprise. In 2007, he became the chairman of Nasscom and here he played a key role in bridging the gap between the industry and academia and worked towards forging closer ties between them.

His tenure as Nasscom chairman also saw the body taking initiatives such as highlighting SMB achievements in IT as well as taking initiative as data security council.

Despite all his achievements, Narayanan is humble, unassuming and simple. His humility and simplicity often hide that he is the same man who has been part of writing the early success story of Indian IT Inc, and a man who has helped his company grow three times in just three years as CEO, while trebling the market cap as well, during that period.

His is a story of what difference a techie can make; what difference an employee can make; and what difference a seemingly simple and straightforward man can make.

Shyamanuja Das and Shrikanth G
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1