Infosys Annual Report 2016-17 LEVERAGING AUTOMATION to TRANSCEND the MUNDANE
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AUTOMATE INNOVATE EDUCATE ANNUAL REPORT 2016-17 AUTOMATE. INNOVATE. EDUCATE. A timeless beacon towards our future At the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, sit three seemingly unremarkable bronze parts, covered in a greenish patina. Together with missing pieces, they represent one of the most complex and sophisticated examples of ancient engineering known to man. This 2,000-year-old marvel is believed to have had 30 interlocking gearwheels, with epicyclical gearing, a crankshaft, and rotating hands. Named for the Greek island near which it was discovered inside the wreckage of a ship, the Antikythera mechanism is considered the world’s first ‘computer’. Built to calculate and display information about astronomical phenomena, the technologies used in it were unique for its time, the likes of which were not seen again for a millennium. From the invention of the arrowhead, to the bicycle, the printing press, and the digital computer, the primary goal for technology has always been to simplify and automate complicated or onerous tasks for humans, so that the resulting efficiencies could be applied elsewhere — towards innovation, and the achievement of loftier goals. Today, when we develop breakthrough technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate mundane cognitive tasks, we accelerate progress by enabling the application of human effort and ingenuity towards finding innovative solutions to even bigger unsolved problems. Meanwhile, these innovative solutions lead to the next phase of automation. Automation and Innovation are intertwined like the facets of a Mobius strip, locked into a continuous virtuous cycle of progress. If Innovation is the engine that powers the vehicle of progress, and Automation the fuel that feeds it, then Education is the context that surrounds them — the routes, the maps, the vistas, the pitfalls, and the destinations. By sharing our knowledge and experiences with the rest of the world, and with future generations, we help to scale and sustain the virtuous cycle. Taken together, Automation, Innovation and Education form the basis of all hope, all progress, and of ultimate transcendence from human suffering. The amazing Antikythera mechanism is for us more than an interesting historical artifact. It is a timeless beacon from our ancestors, and a testament to the human spirit of invention, ambition, and dedication to relentless progress. Within it, we witness the synergy between Automation, Innovation and Education — the pillars of our strategy, and our guiding themes for this year’s Annual Report. CULTIVATING THE POWER OF AUTOMATION A view of our one-acre model farm at the Hyderabad Pocharam campus, where we have implemented our digital agriculture solution. In addition to using automation to design a unique real-time irrigation capability, the solution also deploys sensors to detect vital parameters, such as soil moisture, ambient temperature and humidity, besides employing drones fitted with cameras for real-time monitoring. The solution leverages Big Data analytics to deliver actionable and timely insights to stakeholders across the agriculture value chain. 2 | Board’s report Infosys Annual Report 2016-17 LEVERAGING AUTOMATION TO TRANSCEND THE MUNDANE Many things that were seen as unique and innovative of if they require physical effort, computational capacity even in the recent past are commonplace today. or cognitive reasoning — will be solved by automation. Technological advancement is one driver of this process At an extreme, one could argue that any problem — common, repetitive, routine and mundane tasks once solved by anyone, anywhere, should never have performed by humans are slowly but surely automated. to be solved again by anyone else. This is captured Over the years, this has held true for agriculture, in the age-old adage of wastefulness in ‘re-inventing manufacturing, financial services, retail, and healthcare, the wheel’. This is especially true in the software and and many other industries and functions. Success in technological domains, where artificial intelligence business requires embracing this change, and rapidly (AI)-based automation can be applied to a wide array adapting to the inevitable commoditization of core of tasks. products and services via a cycle of automation and innovation. Automation improves productivity, saves To address this trend in the context of our industry and time, saves resources, and takes basic routine tasks our business, we have undertaken the renewal of our off human hands, so people then have the bandwidth traditional service lines from a ‘people-only’ delivery and the resources to look beyond routine tasks better model to a ‘people + software’ model — where the performed by machines, and focus on finding and solving software results in a significant improvement in both the a new set of problems. It is with this belief that we have scale and the scope at which people can act. built deep strength and momentum into our automation We have already brought this type of software-led programs at Infosys. automation to L1 and L2 support, and also extended it to cover the more challenging L3 / last-line support in Our automation destination We are not far from the time when all well-understood, well-defined, and well-articulated problems — regardless Ravi Kumar S. Mohit Joshi President and President and Segment Head — Deputy Chief Operating Officer Financial Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences Infosys Annual Report 2016-17 automation (RPA) governance, and process discovery — SOFTWARE-LED flank the product. A ‘drag-and-drop’ design studio with AUTOMATION DATA assorted menus and tools, along with ‘record and play’ PEOPLE + SOFTWARE ANALYTICS capability, further complements and deeply automates the process management workflow. At a broader level, Infosys Nia, our next-gen AI platform, is playing a big role in bringing significant automation-led KNOWLEDGE LAST-LINE SUPPORT CURATION productivity improvements to our delivery efficiencies BEYOND L1 AND L2 — across service lines. It supports the deterministic, AI intelligent and cognitive automation of a broad set of IT services management activities and business PROCESS processes. For example, it helps us automate extraction, MONITORING FIXING classification and resolution of incidents. It comes with TEST-FRAMEWORKS an out-of-the-box repository of automation workflows IMPROVING SOFTWARE CODE and scripts that is simple for anyone to use. Today, our engineers use Infosys Nia to automate tasks from both basic L1 / L2 and also the last line of IT operations IT operations — often involving fixes to software code, support. Infosys Nia automates root-cause and impact automated test frameworks, knowledge curating and analysis, and generates test plans for them. By providing also process management. deeper organizational context to incident tickets, it helps This strategy has been especially effective in our BPO services, application services, and verification and DETERMINISTIC infrastructure services. Our broad set of automated INFOSYS TM INTELLIGENT offerings tailored to specific industry and business NIA function requirements, along with our large Agile and COGNITIVE NLP+ML DevOps capability to deliver modern applications in a shorter timeframe, have helped to create dramatic efficiencies in this domain. SCRIPTS Our Panaya offering is another driver of automation in the OUT-OF-THE-BOX FRONTEND area of enterprise application testing. Many enterprise REPOSITORY application-testing teams still manually support user AUTOMATION EXTRACTION acceptance testing using Office tools like Microsoft Word WORKFLOWS CLASSIFICATION FASTER RESOLUTION and Excel. To these clients, Panaya offers a significantly BACKEND OF INCIDENTS more capable, agile and usable alternative to automate verification support for digital projects. By building formal representations of a company’s ERP system, lower time-to-resolution, and helps create opportunities including the many customizations users deploy, Panaya for specialists to find and solve other interesting is able to predict the effects of any changes or upgrades problems. to these systems. It also helps business users create In fact, the cumulative impact of this journey of the test scripts for business processes and, at the same past 12 months has been massive — it has helped us time, generates full documentation of those processes, eliminate around 11,000 full-time employees worth of resulting in significant time and cost improvements over effort, and repurpose those people into more valuable existing manual processes. and rewarding tasks. TM Next-gen intelligence with Infosys Nia Bringing automation advantages to clients On the business process management front, AssistEdge, The capabilities of the automation software that we use our robotic automation tool is helping rapidly digitize and to amplify the potential of our people, when combined automate our work. Well-defined frameworks — including with in-depth understanding of our client businesses and an automation center of excellence, robotic process their IT landscapes, can bring the same definitive edge Leveraging Automation to Transcend the Mundane Infosys Annual Report 2016-17 to their businesses as well. An additional advantage Harnessing the power of knowledge comes from our experienced implementation teams that Another example involves clients who employ unionized are able to support them with the services they need to labor, and hence need to manage multiple labor contracts optimize deployment