We just walked to Reuters today but the first place we went to was the wrong place. The right place was next to the Leela Palace. It was also walking distance, but a bit farther.
One of Reuters' locations in Bangalore. more pics
Mani said that Reuters was reluctant to let us visit them, but they agreed to one hour. We actually ended up staying there for a couple of hours. Two women were our hosts – one is Indian and the other British. We pretty much stayed in one conference room and we were served hot beverages and cookies in a hallway, served by a white-gloved waiter. We got a view of some cubicles through glass windows in the hallway and they said that the rest of the building looked the same. Someone in our group commented that the secrecy is probably due to the bad press they’re getting right now.
The surprising thing about Reuters was that they get only 10% of their revenues from the news business; 90% comes from financial services. The news business grew out of the need for financial market information for their clients, and a lot of the work in India is extracting information from 3,000 sources and reporting them in one place. In fact, all English language financial data now comes from Bangalore. They have a small data development team in Bangalore to develop applications for their own use. Some of the data is extracted, formatted, and added to the database automatically; some are entered manually through a front-end application.
The training of the researchers takes a long time. They get one week of induction training and up to six months of functional training. Even so, it takes up to a year for one researcher to be productive. Researchers get detailed training on the company databases and systems and on the sources of information. After the formal training, mentors are made available to researchers as well.
Wipro
We went first to the Wipro corporate office for a couple of presentations, then to their development center for a tour.
The presentation we got was kinda dry in terms of information. They mentioned the number of centers, the number of employees, the industries their clients are in, the list of clients, what makes them successful (Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma), and their success rate (90% of their projects are on time and under budget). They talked about distributed development and they mentioned the Philippines among other countries.
They are very careful about their clients’ intellectual property. Our host said, “We do not compete with our clients at all.” They don’t work with competitors of their clients and workers have a “cooling period” between projects in the same industry. And for each new project, they create a virtual “clean room” with “fresh engineers.”
They don’t claim to have any special intellectual property of their own – “What we're doing is not rocket science.”
What’s surprising is that they openly talk about their competitors. They acknowledged that the Philippines might be a better candidate for front office outsourcing for US companies because of the cultural affinity between the US and the Philippines. They also praised Sapient multiple times – “Sapient understands offshoring the best. They play the game [like Wipro].” However, they think that the legal KPO is the “domain of smaller players.”
The second presentation was about their knowledge management system – how they “connect people to content” and “connect people to people.” It sounded very similar to an article I had read about a consulting firm, which I can’t remember off the top of my head (McKinsey maybe?). They use Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server with some customization to create their internal website which they call “Knowledge Net.” Then they pull in the different aspects of knowledge management: culture, tools and technology, content, community, business processes, and information systems. They segment their employees between the technology team and the business team and give them different access depending on their needs. The site provides technical documents, expert help, collaboration tools, reusable components, war rooms, networks (which sounds like special interest groups), best practices, case studies, reports, templates, and tools. Every “artifact” expires after 12 months, and the owner is notified to update it. If it is not updated, it is archived and old archives are later purged from the system.
In the development center, an employee morale event was going on. Hundreds were gathered around a courtyard, either on the ground or leaning over terraces of the buildings surrounding the courtyard. In the center, employees were putting on a show (either dancing or singing or something else) for a contest. There were TV monitors around where you can watch what was going on in the stage.
We were split into two groups and alternated guides. My group’s first stop was a lab for electronic equipment. Wipro can design the circuit boards, the drivers, or the applications for set-top boxes and other digital equipment, depending on their client contracts. Our second stop was a conference room that shared glass walls with a control center that monitors web servers worldwide. Clients depend on them to provide the high level of server uptime (more than 99%) that they require. If the server is down, they are able to bring it back up remotely, including rebooting the machine if necessary.
Observations, insights, and lessons learned
The Reuters presentation was slow. It seemed like our hosts were seeing the slides for the first time as well. They looked tired and overworked, and our Indian host later confirmed that she does work long hours, but out of choice. It didn’t sound like everybody else did. I think she’s close to getting burnt out, and her ambition is probably what keeps her going for now.
They say that labor arbitrage is not the focus for the move to India; otherwise, they would have gone to Vietnam or the Philippines or elsewhere. However, they didn’t say why they chose India. I suspect it’s probably one of two things: 1) the cultural affinity between the UK and India, or 2) Reuters is developing a killer financial application and India offers the best technical talent at a low price.
There seems to be some secrecy about the relationship between Wipro and Microsoft. Of the IT sourcing companies we visited, Wipro was the only one that did not mention Microsoft as a client in their slides, although they mentioned a lot of other companies. During the tour, I saw an area labeled “Microsoft .NET” so I asked one of the hosts which groups at Microsoft they worked with. He said that it’s a training area, that’s all. When I said I used to work for Microsoft, he figured that I knew they did some work for Microsoft and he finally admitted it, but he insisted that they also do training. He would not disclose which groups they were working with, so I’m thinking that it might be a new group working on a new product.
Hmm, lots of intrigue and mystery in today’s visits.
Wipro seems to be top-heavy. Our first host was the Chief Strategy Officer, and he mentioned their Chief Quality Officer. Shouldn’t strategy and quality be part of the job of everybody in the company? I just wonder how many chiefs they have. But with 45,000 employees, I guess they don’t have to worry about having too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Pun intended. :-)
In the second Wipro site, there was a pond on the grounds with unusually colored ducks – they were spotted black and white, like the cows. Holstein ducks! :-)
As we were walking during the Wipro development center tour, I had a chance to chat with one of our hosts, Hari. Hari works in corporate in the marketing department; he is new to the company after having moved from an ad agency. I asked him about the chalk powder design on the floor of a hallway that we passed. It was a circular design with an eye in the middle. Hari didn’t know what a mandala is, but this seems to have been created like one, except this one does not have the symmetry or the complexity of a traditional mandala. He told me about the significance of the star symbol and that it represented perfection. He also mentioned about the importance of the numbers 1, 6, and 8 and how everything in the universe is in those proportions. Now, I’m curious; I’ll have to read up on that. Maybe 42 is not the answer to life, the universe, and everything
after all. Maybe it's 1, 6, and 8. ;-)Another failed attempt
Speaking of the universe, I don't think it likes me spending too much.
Mahdad and I got off the bus with Mani to shop at FabIndia, an upscale chain of stores. Mani liked going there because the prices are fixed, and Mahdad remembered seeing some nice sarees in a FabIndia in Delhi. But the sarees in this FabIndia turned out to be expensive. Their cotton sarees (with ugly designs, if you ask me) started at 600 rupees, and their silk sarees (still boring designs) started at 1900 rupees. The saleswoman was kind enough to recommend Forum Mall to find sarees made of silk blends, instead of pure silk, similar to the ones I got in Delhi. However, Mahdad and I decided on Garuda Mall, since we already know what’s there and it’s closer to our hotel.
Garuda Mall turned out to be just as expensive and the salespeople all suggested Commercial Street for the underskirts and blouses. Since it was already late, we figured we’d go to Commercial Street the next day.
We hadn't had dinner, so we hit a cookie shop at the ground level. After Mahdad argued with the sellers that their cookies are not chewy just because it gets softer if they put it in the microwave, I bought a couple anyway to settle down my stomach’s grumblings. And then we found a stand that sold honey-roasted nuts. Mahdad got a small pack and offered me some. They were so good that we went back so I could buy my own pack of honey-roasted cashews.
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