Infosys CFO V. Balakrishnan believes that the role of finance in the Flat World transcends cost structures. To achieve success, global companies must focus on customer delight and leverage local talent. Speaking on ‘The Role of Finance in Supporting Globalization’ at the Oracle CFO summit, he discussed how finance can rise to the challenges and opportunities of globalization.
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Customer delight, a measure of success

According to Balakrishnan, the success of a globalization strategy needs to be viewed from a customer perspective. Infosys measures “success in terms of how well we address the local needs of our customers... We want people with local expertise and industry knowledge who can go and make a difference to our customers.”

"As we look for models of corporate success, European and North American ethnocentric ways need to rapidly yield to being much more curious and knowledgeable about Asia's ascending actors. The IT services company Infosys is a striking example of successful, profitable growth."


In his case study on orchestrating winning performance, Professor Georges Haour of IMD, the acclaimed Swiss management finishing school for executives, observes that Infosys' Global Delivery Model and customer satisfaction indices are two critical contributors to its "breakneck rate of profitable growth".

In the latest of a series of interviews for the Kaplan-Newsweek MBA program, Richard M. Smith, Chairman, Newsweek, spoke with Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO, Infosys.


To support his contention that globalization has always existed, Kris noted that there have always been waves of people moving and work moving. He pointed out that access to talent is fast becoming the biggest challenge for any company, and that rather than taking away jobs, globalization was throwing up several job opportunities - for overseas talent as well as locals.

."Access to talent is going to be the biggest challenge for any company," Kris told Newsweek. "Even though India has a billion people, we only produce about 450,000 engineers, and for IT services we primarily recruit engineers. India is also a fast-growing economy -it's growing at around 8 to 10 percent annually-which means there is tremendous demand for these engineers from other sectors of industry. There are multiple things we're doing to manage this challenge. We want to be sure that we're a company of choice."

Resource : http://www.infosys.com/about/global-positive.asp