On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 7:50 PM, renuka prasad <[email protected]> wrote: > "We won't have as much work for all our employees right now, so we're > encouraging them to contribute to projects on open source and do more > innovative work," > > actual story is here > > Infy offers NGO stint to staff at half pay, read more in the following link > > http://profit.ndtv.com/2009/03/24191435/Infosys-offers-employees-optio.html
As I guessed from the url, but then had to wait a while to confirm by checking the link, it is a pretty old article, March 2009. Although it appears to be an original, it turns out to be in fact rehashing a Forbes magazine snippet (http://bit.ly/16TX9T), which itself contains some more interesting things, such as the fact that Infosys has apparently discovered the need to get into projects such as supply chain management. It reports Infy's other business initiatives, such as fraud management, doubtless inspired by Nilekani's stint at SEBI. Pity they couldn't sell the fruits of that to Satyam. Unless they did. The stories were published as part of his efforts to sell his book (Imagining India) in the US, and that in turn evidently led to his evolution as Snoopy, not the cute self-proclaimed beagle of the Peanuts comic strip, but India's numero uno official invader of personal spaces, advocating a command-and-control approach to solving problems created through centuries of command-and-control of ordinary Indians (you can read here http://bit.ly/OL0l9 what Einstein had to say about that). Anyway, to come back to Infy's Open Source initiative, I figured there must be some way of learning what is coming out of it, since Infy has always been big on claiming a head start on making information known. Not, however, about what it is doing in open source: the site www.infosys.com, which Google tells me is the official Infy website, has no link from its home page to anything even obliquely Open Source, not even the web site, which runs .asp pages. I thought it might be encompassed by the rather grand sounding Flat World initiative, but could not find anything beyond this gem "transformation involves providing business value that exceeds meeting the agreed SLAs". In this case, the agreed SLAs are to do more innovative work (which implicitly presupposes an existing level of innovation) and to contribute to Open Source work (not, as may be supposed from the quote, obviously the same thing - he may even be trying to draw a very clear line between them). In his defence, since making that statement, Nilekani has quit the company, and I suppose is no longer responsible for what it does or fails to do. One trusts that he will not leave the NUID project in the same state, although I will argue that it would have been better had he not joined/created it in the first place. -- Vickram http://communicall.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
