‘We’re allowing our people to become experts’
ATULKUNWAR, president and CTO of Tech Mahindra, believes the emerging changes in technology services would benefit IT firms immensely if they are able to ride on them. He tells B Dasararth Reddy how Tech Mahindra has been gearing up to tap the new opportunities while handling the underlying challenges. Excerpts:
Our ability to entrust more complex functions to machines has brought a paradigm change in enterprise management. How has Tech Mahindra positioned itself to handle these?
As newer, more complex tasks need to be done you need to have the skills to programme those devices and machines because on their own they are of no consequences. This becomes especially important when new sources coming in like AI, IoT as they add new dimensions. It’s almost like a non-living becoming a living. There are skills that are evolving around that and so obviously we are investing very extensively in terms of getting to be a leader in that space.
The second part is that traditionally you may be doing those things and processes very differently and that could have been more manpowerintensive and it may have also used some older tools, which are going to become less useful in the context of this change. As a consequence you need to provide an opportunity to people that they can migrate into new reality and new realms.
We are giving opportunities for people across the board to become the expert on the one end or to migrate on the other and actually look at a third line of option of going to a different vertical that is not moving very fast. Cross move, cross skill or
Could you give an example on how this transition is being handled by both the company as well your tech associates?
We work with SAP very closely on one of their skill sets called Fiori. There is no such thing as a 10-year-old Fiori expert because the whole technology is fairly new, where it gives a different way in which old data can be presented and how customers can interact with traditional data. Traditional data is there but at the front end it’s all changing to Fiori. Whoever picks up Fiori can now become part of building customer experience and whoever does not pick up Fiori will no longer be part of customer experience. They can still continue in the back-end and or they can say, “ok, I will build experience in a non-Fiori environment”.
So, opportunities exist. Just saying that I will only continue to do the same thing. that may not be possible. That’s the change that has come.
Has Tech Mahindra identified such new business opportunities or the emerging needs of global enterprises that can be quickly tapped into for its growth?
Absolutely. Fiori was about such opportunities. That is an emerging area. IoT, AI etc. add a new dimension to an entire data system. And there is the entire digitisation that is happening. It’s not about automating or digitising existing processes but even looking at new ways to do it. That is the evolution that is happening on the software side. So we are participating in that big time.