Business insights are the new oil says Tata Consultancy CEO Natarajan Chandrasekaran

Greg EarlContributor

Updated Jul 3, 2015 – 4.10pm, first published at 12.00am

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For a man at the heart of the relentless quest for knowledge about customers, Natarajan Chandrasekaran has just made a crucial correction mid-sentence. “Information is the new oil. No, rather, insights are the new oil,” he says.

“So building a business based on the insights you can get out of information is going to be more common,” he adds, with the precision of a man dedicated applying cutting-edge technology to business.

The Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) chief executive – known universally as Chandra – has spent his career helping make the technology advisory company one of the world’s best-known Indian businesses. But he also knows that generating information is no longer enough.

Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chief executive Tata Consultancy Services.

“Customer experience is going to be the key thing in the systems of the future,” he declares. “Every business is looking for what it can do to understand my consumer better. What can I do to lock in my customer better? What can I do to understand my customer even better?”

What customers want

Chandra says research is clearly important, especially if it is based on large-scale data about customer experience. But in the modern world, customers who come to TCS for help want to go to market faster, so they want solutions that will let them know what is going on with customers – even instantaneously.

“Design, customer experience, agility, business model innovation: all of this is critical,” Chandra says of the top global corporations he refers to as partners rather than customers of TCS.

BOSS caught up with the TCS chief during a visit to Australia that was partly focused on developing a potential big new set of partners after 28 years of operating here.

Government focus

The company is looking into establishing a Canberra office to develop a government client base, something it has done more of in countries such as India and Britain but less so in Australia, where it has corporate-focused offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. “Today’s digital technology can have a powerful impact in every sector – including government,” Chandra says.

“There are big opportunities in government, in looking into what cloud [computing] can do, what analytics can do. We have the capability, so it’s important for us to try.”

Observers say India’s IT companies flew under the radar to avoid the Licence Raj regulatory mentality when they got started in the sector, which is built on high-end technology skills at one level and plenty of cheap labour at another.

TCS is the largest of the Indian IT companies that have carved out distinctive global business niches while many Indian companies have stayed at home, to enjoy protectionist and statist policies that belie India’s professed desire to be seen as a global economic player.

Transformative phase

Chandra says this is now reversing to some extent. On one hand the new growth and business oriented government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi hopes to embrace more technology in government functions at home; on the other hand, Modi wants to drive more companies from other sectors – especially manufacturing – into global markets to improve domestic competitiveness.

He says expectations about change in Modi’s first year were too high but concedes the Prime Minister has taken the right steps in trying to build growth infrastructure by embracing technology, introducing a consumption tax, simplifying processes and initiating much-needed infrastructure development.

“Twelve months is such a short period when a government is in a transformative phase. But I look at India as a big opportunity. It has a big opportunity from a demographic point of view, with a huge pool of educated youth. There are many capable entrepreneurs in this country if the government has the right policies.”

Disrupting the disruptors

But while opportunities at home present welcome new business for the local IT success stories, Chandra acknowledges that the real task he faces is making sure his company survives the same digital disruption it executes for its partner customers in their sectors. Industry observers say the big broad-based IT consultancies face greater competition from new specialist boutique firms which take tailor-made solutions to potential customers while the big firms offer the standard fare.

Not surprisingly, Chandra disputes this analysis: “Every time there is a technology evolution there are a lot of new players who come in with the technology. This is a part of the game.”

This means he is continually building internal expertise in the company, including via technology incubation such as a neuroscience-based automation platform that will be launched soon. But Chandra has also introduced TCS’s own partnership model, in which it collaborates with a network of smaller companies to create new solutions.

He also rejects the idea that the growth outlook for the big IT firms has slowed, arguing that between organic growth, the collaboration partnerships and appropriate acquisitions he is quite confident strong growth will continue in the next few years.

“It is not true that we have had a weak period of growth. But the market always seems to want us to do better.”

Staff retention

One of the main challenges Chandra faces in the fast-changing tech industry is holding onto talent. Although he comes from a computing background, he has broadened the TCS gene pool by bringing designers and artists into teams that provide customer solutions.

“From a management point of view, for me the workforce is changing. We are a very global company today. We need a core culture with values but we also need to be nimble and also have an agile way of working. We are looking at redesigning our workspace to promote agility.

“We have got to be adaptive and we have to invest in all the right technologies and when we miss it we have to run faster to catch up.

“We have a workforce which is very young. We have a very good retention rate at TCS but that’s something that we have to think of always. You can never say it’s a job done.

“We have got to constantly think about employee engagement practices, opportunities [and] empowerment.”

Greg Earl is The Australian Financial Review’s Asia Pacific editor.

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Greg Earl is an editor and writer. He was the AFR deputy editor, opinion editor, Asia-Pacific editor and a correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo and New York. Connect with Greg on Twitter.