Although ICICI had no legacy in terms of software systems in its ICT architecture, it did have a legacy in terms  of social norms. The company had to transform an environment that was similar to that of a state-controlled bank. A legacy in how a company organizes its decision-making process—consisting of the authority structure, roles, decision criteria, and capabilities of senior management—can determine how that organization copes with complexity.

The social infrastructure and culture fostered by the bank’s senior management since 1996 have been decisive factors behind its capacity to constantly experiment and seize new opportunities. The senior management recruited a young and dynamic management team. Team members were empowered to “kill” old legacy systems. These young managers turned themselves into change agents. In their new culture, managers were willing to share their best people for new initiatives that may not have been directly under the managers’ control. Winning as a corporation became a critical goal. One senior manager used the metaphor of “donating blood” to describe the sharing of the best people in her group for new corporate initiatives. It was not suicide, nor was it stealing. Few were likely to “hoard” key skills. The willingness to share skills reflected the bank’s confidence in its strategy and its willingness to experiment and grow rapidly.

The social architecture within ICICI depicts a sense of urgency and a need for real-time insights from transparent processes and data in all decisions. While hierarchy is used as a substitute for transparency in traditional firms, ICICI tries to use IT to cut as many unnecessary layers as possible from its decision chains. While the bank may not have a formal CIO, the head of IT has a visceral understanding of the bank’s business processes and needs and a similarly deep understanding of business processes and ICT capability as critical elements of senior management. For example, ICICI has aggressively adopted open-source software and has deployed open-office software across the organization, including the senior management staff (for internal communication), and the company is comfortable with it. In summary, the company has created a culture of boldness to constantly seize new opportunities and at the same time mitigate risk through transparency in processes and information.

by C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan, Via The New Age of Innovation: Driving Cocreated Value Through Global Networks (2008)