Overview of Initiatives

I have focused on 3 key areas in my leadership roles:

Driving Product Innovation, by increasing patents, thought leadership, developing key products and with strategic initiatives such as Intrapreneurship, Startup Accelerator, Startup School, InnerSource, I build and enable our employees to build, world class innovative products, leveraging the best and latest technology and ensuring the problem the product was meant to solve is being solved.

Next is Customer Transformation: I work with CxOs, other leaders and experts across the company to help customer CxOs re-imagine their business models and guide them in their transformation journey by leveraging innovation, products, and technology.

Third is Operational Excellence: In order to build and scale solutions and have a sustainable impact, I ensure we leverage the best in class development processes and tools and ensure to get and keep the best employee talents motivated and engaged, so that the organization can deliver great results.

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Over the years I have lead many programs, products, teams and topics to create an impact on the organization, its employees, its customers and the society at large.

Below is a glimpse of some such initiatives and I would be elaborating each in separate post(s) to share my vision, thoughts and learning from them, so you can leverage the same for yourself

COVID-19 – Disaster Management Portal for State Government

The much-needed nationwide lock down was very important for controlling the spread of virus, but it had some side effects due to the disruption to the supply chain and impacting the migrant and daily wage laborers. This had to be fixed urgently and I led the discussions with government and internal leadership and together, we built the relief portal: karnatakafightscorona.org. As the time to market was extremely low, I on-boarded external and internal companies and volunteers to quickly churn out a product and open sourced it. And now we continue building features and making it more holistic, to cover all scenarios for the end to end relief management portal with resource management, inventory management, supply chain management.

Startup School

An annual startup school which attracts an average of 1000 participants, and it combines a venture challenge with a startup curriculum.  The school provides participants access to curated curriculum with lectures, practical exercises, startup founder connects, exposure to leadership and 1-1 mentorship. And finally, an opportunity to pitch this business case and get funded.

Startup Accelerator

Startups are key for expediting delivery of innovation to customers, that is where we recognized the potential many years back years back and setup our accelerator. This was our company’s first in-house startup accelerator, with this we engage with most suitable startups that align with our customer needs and complements our offering and allows our employees to engage with these startups, and this helps them get a new perspective of the product and business development process. It’s amazing that some of the start-ups who were part of the accelerator, have now become unicorns or on the way to become one.

InnerSource Movement

Think of it simply as applying open source methodologies to software development behind a company’s firewall, while still owning the IP. Inspired by the spread of open source software throughout the areas of operating systems, cloud computing, we set-out to emulate the practices of the powerful open source movement to create an internal company collaboration under the InnerSource movement and breakdown silos and bottlenecks. As in most open source projects, anyone in the organization is free to view the code, comment on it, learn new skills by examining it, and submit changes that they think will improve it or customize it to their needs. This movement is focusing its efforts on promoting innersource, identify potential innersource candidates, and coach teams to innersource. At the same time, we innersource applications we are responsible for and leading by example.

Business and Social Intrapreneurship

Driving in-house innovation is the key to change the culture of the org. and enable building of future businesses and products organically and sustainably. And I drive business intrapreneurship to focus on key new business areas and markets which we could capture. And I drive social intrapreneurship, and help build products that would impact the society, environment and our fellow citizens of our beautiful world.

Customer Experience Center

Customer Experience Center act as a front-end for customers and partners to accelerate their digital innovation journey, using Design Thinking and the capabilities of Intelligent Technologies. Our center showcase IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Big Data, Analytics, Data Intelligence and Cloud Platform as key ingredients for digital transformation, making “digital” tangible.

Crowdsourcing Platform

Employees always have great ideas but don’t always have the required skillsets or resources to build a working prototype to further the idea. Hence, leveraging gig economy, we built a crowdsourcing platform, to enable any employee to post ideas and initiatives, and others would volunteer to work on making it a reality.

Recognizing Employee Champions

For the employees this is a platform/program which enables them to share their achievements on various categories which mirror our company values – Innovation, Thought Leadership, Customer Centricity, Collaboration, Social responsibility, Diversity and Inclusion, and for the employees to see their colleagues who are championing these values.

Driving Technology enablement and Thought Leadership

To enable our employees on latest technology developments, and key topics. We conceptualized a program that enables over 5000 employee’s YoY on the latest technology topics, via sessions, hands-on, projects and meetups, thereby building a strong technology community which can be tapped into for future roles and projects.