by Elizabeth M. Ferrarini

Rampant growth definitely describes Wipro Limited, the largest IT services firm outside of the United States. Based in Bangalore, India, Wipro has grown from 5,000 employees in 2000 to more than today's 65,000 employees, located in 22 countries around the world. Wipro services global companies in the areas of outsourcing, software application development and maintenance, research and development, and systems integration.

No one feels Wipro's 30 percent growth as much as Laksman Badiga, chief information officer. His IT group oversees the network infrastructure, software development and delivery, security and compliance, and governance to support a workforce that is exclusively comprised of IT professionals. With a background in driving large areas of customer systems, Badiga has the right background and proven experience at Wipro to head up the IT organization. He manages services teams with more than 3,000 employees who delivered solutions to multiple customers across the globe. He also has been involved in Wipro's human resources area, in which he was responsible for recruiting more than 20,000 people in three years.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently talked with Laksman Badiga about meeting the IT needs of a business with a dynamic growth rate.

EL: What are the biggest IT challenges you face, besides handling  growth?

LB: We need to keep on top of how to make processes consistent and maintain consistent delivery for a large system implementation. We need to balance the long-term approach of IT planning with managing the day-to-day tasks. We also serve as a "living laboratory" before we deploy any products or processes for customers. They like knowing that we've put things through their paces and have corrected any problems.

EL: What's your strategy for designing systems to support expected  growth?

LB: Our strategy has been to look ahead three, to five years, which is hard to do in our business. However, we've managed to do it. In 2000, we made a fundamental change in our system design. At the time, we had 5,000 employees. We said we should build systems and processes that would get us through 2005, with about 50,000 employees. In 2006, we started the process over again, but this time, we're looking at systems that would enable us to grow 10 times over during the next five years. By then, we should be at more than 200,000 people.

EL: How do you manage projects with so many people?

LB: We're very process oriented. We've built a system that enables all of our employees to follow the same process for project management. Because we are adding 15,000 new people a year, we had to bring in consistent processes and consistent delivery to our internal customers. We needed to have a systems-driven approach rather than a people-driven approach. This system encompasses the quality processes that enable us to drive our entire software development systems.

EL: Can you describe your governance model?

LB: We're concerned about several things -- how well we are aligning with the business, and how well we are demonstrating the value we are creating.

We've created a strong business ownership model for several years. At the lowest level, we have an owner for every function that goes on in the business. These people are responsible for propagating internally and understanding the business requirements. This group meets weekly with IT to make sure we're going in the right direction, both strategically and tactically. We also have a monthly, and quarterly review to make sure the business unit managers know what they are getting. Every six months, we look at the strategic direction of where the business is going, but we don't bring IT into this process.

EL:  How do you handle security, both internally and externally?

LB: Because we're connected to most of our customers, we make sure that we don't provide any crossover access to other customers. In fact, we try to segregate at our firewall each of the customers. We provide a way for those working on that customer account to get only to that customer. All of our offices are seamlessly connected to the network. In some cases, when we operate from our network in India, we have to go through our US network to come back into our network in India. We've also integrated many of our customers' security policies with our own.

We use a variety of Symantec products to run checks consistently on the flow of information inside and outside our company. About 90 percent of the email we get consists of spam, and we block all spam at the entry point. So, we allow about 10 percent of email to get through. We also have created an information audit group to make sure we stay current with our security practices. We also allow customer audits to take place, and they enable us to learn their best practices for security and to learn ours.

EL: How do you handle the influx of resumes you get each year?

LB: Six years ago, we created a recruitment system called Synergy, which ties into a people-allocation system. Every new project has its people requirements. These requirements are passed to our people-allocation system, which runs off our SAP HR system. The people-allocation system looks at the skill sets of our current employees and, in some cases, it flags those employees whose skills need to be updated with more training. If the people-allocation system can't find the appropriate internal employee matches, then it passes the project requirements to Synergy. Synergy, in turn, searches the resume databases for those who meet the project requirements, and then selects those resumes for the HR recruiter assigned to the project. The recruiter can automatically scan those resumes.

Anyone can place his or her resume in Synergy by entering it online at the Wipro Web site. The database has about 200,000 active resumes out of a total of about one million.

EL: What new technologies are you considering?

LB: We’re using service-oriented architecture (SOA) as a way to define our technology and to tie the processes together with that technology. We're also using a business-process-management rule engine to define how we can create unified systems. Our goal is to create systems that can be easily adapted to customers' needs. When it comes to SOA, we're debating between going with IBM or Oracle; we might wind up going in both directions.

EL: What are some of your best processes for IT?

LB: Our entire IT department uses all of the service delivery aspects of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). We also help our customers to carry out ITIL internally. We also use Lean and Six Sigma. We're one of the first companies to apply Six Sigma and the Lean production model to software development and delivery, starting in 2002. Our goal is to use Lean to improve our software processes.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a freelance technology writer based outside  of Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.