Subramanyam Putrevu, Chief Information Officer, Mindtree
Enterprises in the IT-enabled services (ITeS)/ business process management (BPM) industry have been early adopters of information and communication technology systems for enhancing business efficiencies. Companies in this space have been leveraging technologies like audio and video-conferencing, cloud computing and big data analytics to ensure timely delivery of services and provide cutting-edge technology solutions to clients. The next wave of technological growth will be driven by automation and artificial intelligence. Leading enterprises in this space talk about their IT strategies, technology trends, and challenges in implementing new technologies…
What is your company’s telecom and IT blueprint? What are some of the ongoing and planned IT initiatives and how are these helping the organisation?
Directionally, we want to provide efficiency to the end-user to use whatever we have at our disposal and deliver the end-product. Many of the initiatives that we are taking revolve around this. We want to make sure that we have a standardised platform on which users can access the company’s resources. We are standardising primarily using Microsoft technologies that would enable us to go in the direction we want to take.
We are one of the early adopters of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, which is one of the enterprise solutions that have enabled us to deliver a bottomless experience to our end-users. For example, we use Microsoft SharePoint for document sharing within the organisation or as a document record engine that one can use for searching. We also use Office 365 videos wherein our entire learning portal is developed. It caters to our needs within the organisation for learning and capability building. Then, we use Skype for Business for collaboration across teams and other tools like the Microsoft platform for analytics and deriving data insights. Now, we are planning to adopt Microsoft Teams to facilitate collaboration within a smaller group.
Looking at IoT and the solutions that we are building, we have our global learning centre in Bhubaneswar. As a part of that campus, we have initiated IoT in two areas, one in water conservation and the other in temperature management.
For big data analytics, we want to drive a culture within the organisation wherein more data-driven efficiency is brought in. We will be bringing this across functions to boost business and bring insights into business functioning. We have embarked upon this journey and a lot of data-driven decisions will be taken in the future. The other area is automation, where the focus is on a self-furnished driven model. Some of our tools require passwords, changing passwords or account lock-out. So, to improve efficiency, we are developing a self-managed portal wherein end-users can do these things on their own. We have explored q2 to bring in some level of automation within the organisation. However, these are just experiments at this point.
What are the key emerging technology trends in the BPM/ITeS industry? What are the challenges in implementing new technologies?
IoT is one of the key trends that will have a huge impact and change the way organisations work. Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing are some of the other trends that would influence the decision-making of organisations. This, coupled with big data analytics, which gives an insight into what is the current trend, would have a huge impact on decision-making and the way in which the data can be analysed.
As far as the challenges are concerned, although new technologies have given a lot of flexibility and direction, the main challenge is to find the right talent to implement those technologies. The second challenge is that while the technology is available, articulating the problem that needs to be solved is an issue. If the problem statement is not clear that becomes an issue in terms of articulating and categorising the problem statement. The third challenge is making the problem statement to get an insight in terms of understanding what business problems need to be solved. This is because the technology can be implemented, but the business owner should also understand how these technologies can be used to solve a business problem. So, the three challenges are the availability of talent because technology changes very rapidly, identifying the problem that has to be solved, and whether the business problem or business solution is clearly specified.
What is the outlook for the adoption of new technologies like IoT, automation, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and cloud in the BPM/ITeS industry?
IoT has already been adopted by our organisation in the water conservation and temperature management domains. We plan to further expand the usage of IoT in other areas. Big data analytics has been adopted at a fairly good level within the organisation. Some of the organisations have already adopted these technologies and others are also willing to adopt them. Big data is being widely used by IT organisations in the retail industry. In the energy sector, IoT is playing an increased role. Automation would also play a major role in the future.
The technology space is changing rapidly. So, making a wise decision in terms of what is best suited to be used as a platform from a user adoption perspective is needed. From a roll-out perspective, it is easier, but adoption would still be a challenge. So, adequate focus and thrust needs to be given to ensure that end-users are able to consume the product in which technologies are involved.
How have telecom and IT solutions helped the BPM/ITes industry in enhancing business efficiency?
If you look at the telecom revolution and subsequently the data revolution, they have given a lot of benefits and improved the efficiency of organisations. The telecom revolution in the form of voice services has enabled organisations to communicate, which has facilitated decision-making. Traditionally, voice was primary. But now voice is also being used over the data medium and data is becoming primary. Owing to this, one-to-one calling has become the norm of the day and collaboration has become much more seamless. One of the tools that we use for collaboration is Skype for Business, which is used to discuss, debate, or collaborate across different locations or different sets of people either within the organisation or between organisations and their customers. Given that organisations today are growing and located in different locations, collaborating has become very efficient and seamless due to several IT or telecom tools.
Moreover, documents that were available only on desktops earlier are now available on mobiles as well. While we have Skype for Business as one of the largest platforms at Mindtree, we also have other cloud-based solutions that help us to collaborate. For example, we use a tool called BlueJeans, which helps us collaborate from anywhere. BlueJeans enables one to log in from anywhere for video-conferencing using a mobile. So, collaborating, discussing, debating and decision-making have become more efficient due to such tools. This has improved overall productivity and reduced the time spent to reach out for making decisions.
In the larger context, making resources available at any given time at any given place has become much more seamless. With the data revolution, technologies have also changed. Technology advancement is enabling organisations to make better policy decisions. Further, data access has become much more seamless.
