Lockdown is the word we never thought would suddenly become so popular in our corporate and social lives. There is hardly anyone across the world who has not heard this word now and is probably not experiencing the same.
However, when it comes to the IT fraternity, we can say they are ?locked but not down.? The kind of demands and workloads which suddenly came in to the IT fraternity, be it the CIOs/IT Heads, their IT teams or OEMs and Partners was humongous and hats off to the efforts made by them to facilitate the WFH (Work from Home) and the business continuity and audio video and ERP connects, etc.
This has indeed brought up many new challenges and learnings and therefore there is a need to revisit the thoughts and approach our Corporates have towards the IT function.
It is now clear that IT is not only a business-centric support function but is a must to have business need and therefore organizations have to re-visit their technology landscape and have to plan to ensure that they have the right technologies, tools, processes and people to facilitate the new norms of running their businesses in the days to come. This would require them to peep outside their own organizations and hire the right tech partners to come and help them re-visit and re-design and re-implement their IT setups to cater to the business needs.
We have been talking about the suitability of technology tools to the organization needs and the need to ensure that the business users are trained to use the tech-tools and the fact that you should always test and keep your Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and workloads ready for high volume use, all this has become evident in the recent times and will have to be further ensured and strengthened in the days to come.
India is a land of rich cultural heritage, hardworking, educated, English-speaking young population with innovation and creativity embedded in them, all this is going to come up to help rescue the situation to overcome the business needs post-COVID times. As is being talked about, India is poised to become a strong manufacturing base to cater to the world?s upcoming demands and it is being forecasted that Indian Corporates will have to rise up to cater to these demands and technology induction will become the must-have part of erecting a strong manufacturing base.
However, irony of the situation is that India is dependent on external world when it comes to tech products, pick up any area of technology whether it is in communications and networking products or ERP or products from Microsoft, Google and the likes, etc, etc. While all these OEMs aspire to have Indian customers to cater to their revenue targets, there is now a need that Indians should focus on innovation and design, produce world-class tech products and manufacture them to help us become self-reliant on our tech needs.
Our government is well focused and supportive on this. The recent reward scheme announced to create an Indian Audio-Video Conferencing product and multiple other government promotion and schemes are part of motivation efforts our government is making to wake up Indian tech folks to help execute these challenges.
Also the new normal post-COVID will require us all to induct technology solutions like Hybrid Cloud, Apps Modernization, Containers, Smart Cities, Smart Communities, Device Form Factor Change, Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data in various domains and therefore Indian tech folks have to be ready to raise up their bars on putting their collaborative efforts to make our industry tech-heavy on all this.
While the Corona lockdown, version 1.0 and now version 2.0 have provided us all, the most important thing we all wanted in our life, that is time, there is a need to learn, un-learn and re-learn to be ready to handle the new norms and to collaborate with each other to form startups and communities to help cater to the upcoming tech demands.
Almost all big tech OEMs and partners we interact with are more interested to find out the new demands as also the execution skills and innovation being displayed by startups and most of them already has a start-up ecosystem in place. So need of the hour is to capitalize on this industry need and be ready to act and display your execution capability.
It is evident that in the immediate times to come, India will face huge opportunities to grow and execute in the space of manufacturing and tech demands and therefore lockdown should be utilized to strategize and plan our capabilities to help cater to these demands by our Corporates and the Society now and in the times to come.
The author is Domain Leader – Hi-tech IT & Tech at Praxis Global Alliance
