Whichever industry it is catering to, be it architecture, an IT firm cannot solve the internal problems of its clients by remaining a distant observing outsider and being a mere instructor. That IT firm must become a compassionate companion creating a seamless and integrated backbone of an IT system of its clients’ businesses. Just the way Xebia does, with the promise of delivering Software Engineering, Strategy, Consulting and Digital Services.
Initially, beginning as a group of architectural advisory, Xebia’s General Manager and Region Head, Shankar Garg fast grasped this scenario and quickly transformed the company into IT Architects. Today, by helping his client, Shankar is creating digital leaders.
In a candid discussion with Insights Success, Shankar elaborated on this visionary change which led to Xebia’s present accomplishments. That awe-inspiring interview is given herein.
Please tell us about the saga of your reputed business since its inception.
As an organization, we started as a group of senior architects who were helping some of the largest banks in Europe with their architecture strategies. Around two decades back, we were doing majority assessment scans on architectures for banks which were primarily monolithic at that time. We were helping them move away from monolithic architectures to much more granular, or basically smaller, architectures.
That’s how, initially, the company name also had IT architects in it. And, once we presented our findings about these maturity assessments and transformation plans, clients liked them a lot. But, about two decades back, none of our customers had the bandwidth or the skill sets to implement the transformation plans we recommended. That’s why, they said they liked our plan and they really wanted to implement it. They asked us why we did not help them implement it and that’s how the entire IT services organization was born and that’s how we are into this IT consulting services business.
What was your inspiration behind venturing into the business arena?
When we started around two decades back, there were many closed-box technologies, like Oracle and so on. They were doing great progress, but we thought there are so many open-sourced technologies, like Java, and Java was our proven bet. So, we went ahead with Agile and Java as the two core mainstream service lines for our business.
The inspiration that we fundamentally believed was that instead of working in a Water fallish manner, where the first product reaches business stakeholders at least a year later, it is best for everyone that small glimpses of the product reach business stakeholders within the first two weeks after they give us the requirements. And at that time, we thought this was going to phenomenally change the way IT services companies work.
The second inspiration was that we felt that instead of working with these closed-boxed technologies, it would be better to work with Java — which was an open-source and also free — and other related technologies which were also free. So, we reduced the overall IT project development cost.
To sum it up, we now had the ability to deliver every two weeks on an open-source platform. And we also reduced the time to market and reduced the overall development cost — these were the two main inspirations for getting into this business.
What were the initial challenges that you had to surmount to ensure your business’s success rate reached greater heights?
At Xebia, we picked up Agile methodologies and, at that time, 99% of the projects were going on in the Waterfall methodologies. As everyone knows by now, Agile is not only about project management—it is all about a mindset, people’s behaviour and the processes we work on. It also involves the technology making it an overall game-changer.
Thus, at that time, we not only had to win a particular customer but also had to win a customer against the most popular software development methodology. So, it was Waterfall versus Agile.
We had to first help people understand the pitfalls of Waterfall and then teach them how to work in a new, much more incremental way. That was the biggest challenge we faced at that time—first, helping people change their mindsets and making them understand that there was a better way to work, a better way to collaborate and a better way to reduce time to market.
What professional values and qualities do you think your clients value in you and your company the most?
Our values define quality without compromise and connect with the customer. The very first thing our customers expect is quality without any compromise. There are many times when customers push us to deliver something faster than it really can be delivered. But, when we make them understand that, if they try to do this, we would, probably, have to cut corners, skip some unique SKCs etc. and they do understand. We explain to them that today, we might deliver sooner. But, if we do it without quality, it has to be revisited anyway. So, it is better to do it right the first time around. With all my experience at Xebia, I have seen that our customers appreciate this fact and, many times, we help them appreciate that quality without compromise is our topmost priority.
The second thing that customers really like about us is our connect with them; we understand their challenges wearing their hats and analyzing situations from their perspective. We hand-hold them through the process and extend the required support. That connection between our techies/consultants and the customer is where we win the real challenges.
What are the USPs that highlight your brand/company’s uniqueness in the industry you are catering to?
Our unique strength lies in our people. As an organization, we want to be recognized as thought leaders in areas that we work on. To achieve this, we continuously hire exceptional people. We strive to innovate in everything we do and ride the latest technology wave. We encourage our employees to learn new technologies, write a lot of blogs and books and participate in hackathons.
So, this ecosystem helps us and our techies to be at the forefront of the technology revolution and helps our customers understand how we can work with the latest technologies in a better way. So, that is where our uniqueness comes into play.
As an experienced professional, what would you like to advice the budding aspirants willing to enter the business world?
This is my advice to the people I’m training in business right now. When one is fresh out of college, either technical courses or business programs, one tends to focus primarily on only one of the techniques. As coders, we basically tend to focus on the technology and, as business graduates, we tend to focus only on the business solutions.
My suggestion to them would be to focus on three things—people, process and technology. Irrespective of whether you have a technical background or business, we are all humans first. In whatever we do, whatever solutions we bring, nowadays, most of the users’ journey—for bank, for retailers and for everything—is purely digital.
How you introduce empathy in any process or workflow is very important because we are moving more towards the digital world. Basically, we are interacting less with people and our main medium of interaction is, probably, the mobile app or the user interface we have built. So, how you introduce empathy in that entire workflow and how you collaborate with your colleagues is extremely important.
Then comes the process and the simpler it is, the better. Many a time, we come across applications and programs built in the process that become so complicated over a period of time that, sometimes, we need to look at things in a much simpler way. So, simplicity wins.
The next is technology. For technology graduates, I suggest that they not only focus on technology, but also understand how Agile works because, a lot of times, we see that when a person is working individually, s/he is brilliant in terms of coding. But, when put in a team, it becomes difficult for them to collaborate. That’s where the challenge comes in.
So, for coders, learning about collaboration and Agile is more important and, for business graduates, learning about technology—having a basic overview of how technology works, how the software development lifecycle goes and what the latest technologies are—these are equally so. How can one mix one’s business processes with technological advancements? That’s where we feel fresher’s should be trained.
How do you envision Xebia’s operations with the emerging technologies and automated tools that are revolutionizing the business world by enabling innovations?
I believe advancements in technology and entire AI or automation will help people focus on what they do best—innovate. For instance, right now, we have a fully automated process of reimbursements. There are many people within the administration and finance teams who have saved hundreds of hours every month and now, they can focus on something better. Same with the entire automated billing system, our PMOs and finance team do not need to run from pillar to post to get the time sheets of each individual and submit them to our customers. It is a fully automated system.
With advancements in technology in the current times, you don’t need to be a master of it to use it. If I use it in the Cloud, there is AI, ML, natural language processing and image-processing available as a service. It is plug-and-play. We believe this encapsulation of technology will lead to more innovative solutions in future.
