IT's got room for managers

HYDERABAD: It seems management skills are taking precedence over technology expertise in IT companies. In an effort to successfully marry business goals with technology solutions and enhance productivity, IT firms are expanding their training and recruitment programmes beyond engineering. While some are busy tying up with leading management institutes for research and training, others are looking at recruiting more and more management graduates.

“As part of our new strategy, we have increased our hiring from management institutes. While other companies recruit one management graduate for every 50 technology people, we want to up our ratio to 1:20,” said Cognizant president and CEO Lakshmi Narayanan.

The company is also planning to sponsor its employees for various MBA programmes and is looking at partnering with leading business schools in the country. “IT companies should focus on building leadership skills among employees and the new strategy will help us develop leaders within the organisation.

Time has come for technology companies to focus on managing businesses and add value to existing services. We want to create young leaders so that they can build the organisation and take it forward,” he pointed out.

The company has already put in place a prototype for its sponsorship programme. “We have already sponsored a handful of people for MBA programmes in India and North America. We are also in talks with leading B-schools in India for sponsored MBA programmes,” he said.

Talking to ET, Prashant Srivastava, managing partner (India) of Gallup Organisation, said firms need to focus on management skills for developing IT solutions to a business problems. “Tech-savvy employees sometimes miss out this kind of an opportunity as their outlook is different.

Technology for the sake of technology will not bring in productivity. Every business problem needs to be looked at in a different way so that one can implement technology solutions to fix it,” he said.

According to him, people management skills coupled with good leadership will also help companies defy attrition. “Our studies find that employees join organisation and leave managers. So IT companies need people, who are good at managing people. This will, in turn, increase productivity,” he said.

He said in the US financial analysts evaluate a firms’ market values based on `employee engagement’. “Recent quarterly financial reports and related conference calls between management and stock analysts, references to what Gallup calls it Q12 ratings, could quantify an employee’s engagement.”