Infosys’ Vishal Sikka wants to be at ‘Zero Distance’ from his clients

If you ever happen to visit Infosys’s Bengaluru office, you would find a computer outside CEO Vishal Sikka's office that is never switched off. The live web link there is on 24x7, so that employees can talk to their counterparts in Palo Alto whenever they want to.

"The whole idea is to get Infosys employees to chat with each other whenever they want. No need to block calendars, no need to send emails. Cuts out the bureaucracy," an employee told ET.

Cutting down the layers has been a major push with Infosys ever since Sikka has come in. To ease this further, India's second-largest software exporter is also working on a pilot project with 10,000 people, in which the traditional, five-layer organisational structure has been broken down into a two-tiered one, a welcome step from the Indian IT industry's conventional pyramid model.

"Traditionally, we've had several layers within the organisation. We've had project managers and then there is a senior project manager, a group project manager, etc., and so on. So we want to flatten the five layers down to two," Sikka told ET.

The new structure would have a project manager at the centre, who along with his own team would get support from functional teams like human esources, legal, finance and purchasing.

"Basically, this acts as a small startup. Instead of a traditional top-down pyramid, we create a more bottom-up thing where you have thousands of small entities like that and the management is enabling these people to go out there and be innovative. This is underneath what Zero Distance is," Sikka further stated. "The reason why it's called Zero Distance is because you have zero distance to the client, zero distance to the value. Otherwise in big organisations, layers form over time, far away from clients," he added.

Sikka is of the belief that this restructuring would make Infosys more entrepreneurial and livelier.