New Delhi: Visualise this : At a Harvard Business School education fest recently, a Tata Consultancy Services team collects 20 resumes from the conglomeration of top of the line business schools - Stern, Stanford, Columbia, and of course Harvard. This is part of a calibrated response from India’s first billion dollar software services entity – TCS. A paradigm shift is taking place at the software major as it actualises its move up the value chain.

Almost simultaneously, TCS scouts fan out across the six IIMs and XLRI in search of the best management talent. Executive vice-president S. Mahalingam revealed the contours of the changing ethos at TCS. He says" "TCS is turning into a high-end consulting firm, but it is following a clearcut roadmap with a structured approach which goes back to 2000." The journey began in the mid-1990s when TCS had two designated business lines – business orientation and technology orientation.

Since 2000, TCS has realised that though it is in a technology oriented business, it requires human resources who can think strategically to implement specific lines of business, with the necessary domain expertise in order to address and articulate issues. As such Mahalingam said. "Over the last three years, we have hired MBAs very aggressively. We have hired 150 MBAs per year and should add another 150 this year. We have hired these people with domain expertise in finance."

TCS chief information officer Kesav Noori is the man behind another key initiative which is trying to electronically connect all the 21,200 employees of TCS and CMC. As he says, "Like every other company we need to manage our business efficiently. We are distributed and dispersed across locations and our people lose touch with the mother TCS."

Starting March-end, eTCS will ensure that everyone is electronically integrated both internally and externally.

Noori says this single point of reference to transact with TCS will act as a catalyst. A dedicated team of 120 people has been overseeing the eTCS project. The way it will work is that production, delivery and support will be integrated. Noori says: "The idea is to leverage the intangible wealth of knowledge based services and track the competence of people and convert it into intellectual wealth."

With a holistic project of Rs.50 crore (including people cost), taking ideation to the next level of competency, harnessing it and creating capital out of it is the primary function of eTCS. Between eTCS and the hiring of MBAs, it is obvious that a rebranding and repositioning exercise is underway at India’s premier software services consulting company.