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Tata Infotech redefines roles, responsibilities of senior officials Financial Express - June 8, 2001

TATA Infotech has redefined the roles and responsibilities of senior officials for strengthening system integration in its India division. According to Tata Infotech managing director Nirmal Jain: "The roles have been redefined for better execution and marketing of the various projects undertaken by the company in India."

The company has made majority of investments in marketing — 40 per cent of the total investments. It is planning to concentrate on providing educational services in South Africa through the newly formed company — Consilience Technologies — promoted as a joint venture by Tata International with a South African company. The company will primarily focus on software and system integration in South Africa.

The company has incorporated the Tata Business Excellence Model since 1997-98 and has also been an active member of the quality movement initiated by the Tata group under Tata Quality Management Services (TQMS).

Dr Jain is also the guardian chief executive officer for the Mumbai division of the Tata group community development initiative programme — Tata Counsel for Community Initiative.

According to company insiders, the roles and responsibilities have been redefined to utilise the skills of these personnel in marketing the software and systems that are introduced in the corporate sector from time to time.
"There are employees within the corporate establishment with multi-utility skills. This means they have technology and marketing skills that forms the core business functions of our enterprise. With the newly defined responsibilities in place, these employees there will now have an enhanced responsibility of not just creating a technology, but also venturing into the areas of marketing it, the insider informs. "Therefore, we are on the look out for employees with a strong technical base to strengthen our marketing support as a means to utilising their multi-fold capabilities. Such capability utilisation systems would assist us in generating better bottomlines at the lowest possible employee cost," elaborates the source.

Company officials also added that in line with this redefined roles and responsibilities, there are also plans of realigning the entire hierarchical system in the organisation.

"We are planning to realign our existing hierarchical set-up in another six months time so that this initial step towards redefining the responsibilities of our personnel receives an extended support," said the insider. However, Dr Jain said there is no such move for realignment of positions in hierarchy as of now.

Realignment of positions would entail instituting several renewed designations that synchronise with the new roles and responsibilities that are presently being entrusted on their workforce.

More importantly, these new initiatives also aim at taking an integrated approach towards delegating responsibilities within the employees of the organisation. "The company is looking at people with varied abilities to make them multi-dimensional in their approach rather than merely delivering a job that has been delegated to them," the insider informs.

Besides, he also added that another objective behind this initiative of redefining roles is to create a sense of challenge by linking their work directly to generating attractive bottomline results.