The Live Enterprise

About the Author

Jeff Kavanaugh is vice president and global head of the Infosys Knowledge Institute, the research and thought leadership arm of tech services leader Infosys. Over a 30-year career spanning industry, consulting, and tech, he has worked with dozens of companies around the world to improve their competitiveness and accelerate growth.

Rafee Tarafdar is a senior vice president and chief technology officer of the Strategic Technology Group at Infosys. He has over 20 years of IT experience, from coding and developing products for the manufacturing and banking industries, to consulting on transformational solutions for retail, consumer goods, and logistics clients.

Main Idea

The main idea of "The Live Enterprise: Create a Continuously Evolving and Learning Organization" by Jeff Kavanaugh and Rafee Tarafdar is to provide a model that transforms large, complex businesses into agile, digital ecosystems that evolve with changing market needs. The Live Enterprise model leverages the benefits of startup operating models and integrates them with advanced technologies and strategic objectives to create a continuously learning and adapting organization.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Live Enterprise Model
3. Quantum Organization
4. Perceptive Experiences
5. Responsive Value Chains
6. Intuitive Decisions
7. Hybrid Talent
8. Design to Evolve
9. Digital Runway
10. Micro is the New Mega

Introduction

The Live Enterprise model was developed by Infosys as a response to the limitations of traditional operating models. It focuses on creating an agile, digital ecosystem that can adapt to changing market needs. The model is built on six strategic objectives: agility of a startup, responsiveness to customer needs, a networked and connected ecosystem, velocity of ideas and innovations, competitive advantage through platforms, and extreme automation in everything they do.

The Live Enterprise Model

The Live Enterprise model integrates the following elements:

• Quantum Organization: An agile organizational structure that drives collaboration, innovation, and strategic alignment across distributed teams.
• Perceptive Experiences: Creating valuable employee and customer experiences through responsive and thoughtful interactions.
• Responsive Value Chains: Reimagining value chains to improve efficiency and eliminate unnecessary steps.
• Intuitive Decisions: Automating routine decisions and enabling maximum human intuition for higher-order analysis.

Quantum Organization

A quantum organization moves quickly and evolves continuously. It drives multiple initiatives in parallel and at scale, enabled by shared digital infrastructure. The key characteristics include:

• User at the heart: Fundamental questions are asked at the beginning of each project to ensure user-centricity.
• Hyper-productive collaborative teams: Cross-functional teams take an end-to-end view of the value stream and user experience.
• Rapid experimentation and innovation: Teams rapidly experiment with new ideas and roll them out quickly.
• Shared digital infrastructure: Connects humans, data, and things across the ecosystem.
• Micro-change management: Frequent small interventions drive rapid adoption and change.

"Amazon is a machine to make a machine—it is a machine to make more Amazon." – Benedict Evans