‘Seamless collaboration of technology and openness in its adoption’ is what Laxman Kumar Badiga is betting on in near future. As the CIO of Wipro Technologies, he is trying his best to drive these initiatives within the organization. “The next big thing to happen to the IT industry according to me is collaboration with all the technologies coming in place and being seamlessly adopted across all verticals,” says Badiga. Exemplifying his thoughts, he talks about mobility and cloud computing, the current buzz in the industry.

Cloud computing, today, is not pervasive as every vendor has his independent way of deploying it. But in the long run he is looking forward to the setting up of standards so that it can be deployed uniformly by all vendors. And it would be the winning companies who would be driving this than others. Similarly, compared to ten years back, what mobile was and what one can do today with it while on the move is completely different. People everywhere can access uninterrupted computing via mobile devices and laptops. Collaborating mobility with technologies like cloud computing will result in adding a whole new perspective to one’s business and enable companies to seamlessly stay connected to their clients, and add value to them. Similarly, there are several things one can do with new technologies, especially in the services area, and CIOs are seeing the beginning of it.

Over the past decade there has been tremendous growth in the technology sector and the greatest challenge for CIOs globally is to observe the various evolving technologies and methodologies and see what can be applied within the organization to leverage business.

There are always best practices across industry and it is important to realize how we can pick one of them and apply it efficiently in the industry. “At Wipro, we have three main businesses - consumer care, developing hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders, and IT services (this being the largest of the three). Being in the IT industry and having serviced numerous customers, we observe what is driving our customers and adopt suitable procedures and technologies to add value to them and also within our company. Simultaneously, we observe what is happening in other industries and spot the best practices in the industry and integrate them in our business,” says Badiga. The simplest example he gives is of Toyota. When Toyota started with lean manufacturing nobody thought that it could be applied for software too.

“Wipro was probably one of the earliest services companies to drive the adoption of lean manufacturing processes in software. We not only used it to improve our own software delivery process globally and succeeded but also passed it on to our customers as well,” he reminisces. Similarly, shared services with BPO perspective were created. The team figured out how one could create a factory model to provide shared services to multiple customers. Both these initiatives were duly recognized and awarded by NASSCOM. On the same note, even technologies can be adopted from other industries.