The question that comes up is, where does this next wave of excellence come from? And the answer is very simple it comes from technology and that’s what everybody believes. But then the question that comes is, where does this technology come from? It comes from people and it is you who mould, nurture, develop and mentor these people, says Padma Shri Dr BVR Mohan Reddy, Executive Chairman, Cyient Ltd. In his keynote speech, at the inaugural session of the 21st NHRDN National Conference 2018, at HICC, in Hyderabad, he gave insights into the forthcoming waves of change. Corporate Citizen brings you the excerpts
"The beauty of upcoming technologies is, people like me have tremendous belief that while it will disrupt economies and certainly will bring about lot of change, but this time the change will also impact everybody and we have to ensure that it will bring social equality to the world"
It becomes extremely gratifying for people like me that even NHRDN now recognizes that excellence will come through technology. And it’s their responsibility too, to make sure the right levels of awareness are instilled and ensure that everybody participates in this particular wave of change.
If you look back at the word called technology to me technology and mankind are synonymous to each other. If you look at the first industrial revolution, which came way back in second-half of the 18th century, it was driven by technology. First-time mankind was experiencing that the muscle power can be replaced by mechanical power. That is when mankind started seeing steam engines, which then powered railroads. A tremendous amount of change came by. And, so was the second industrial revolution, which was largely led by mass production. It was Henry Ford, who had the idea of the assembly line technique of mass production and therefore the cost of production came down dramatically and cars became accessible to everybody and anybody.
The third industrial revolution which was in the 1960s, was all driven by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) more people call it as computer revolution or they call it as the ICT revolution largely 1960s was when it came by. It was driven by two things, one is computer and the other was the internet. But, what we see as the fourth industrial revolution, it has no barrier in the world so far, because the speed at which the change is coming about, has never been experienced by anybody, at any point of time. So, what is the reason, why this acceleration is tremendous? What we see is unbelievable acceleration, which we call as exponential. There are four factors, which are making this acceleration happen, as what it is.
The first and the foremost is which is fairly well-known as the law called “Moore’s Law”. It is the observation made, by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corporation. And Gordon Moore, way back in 1974 said, “The amount of computing power that you can put on a wafer, will double itself every eighteen months, the cost will come down by half and the size will also come down by half”. People then thought Moore has gone mad, this will never happen. Twenty years later, in 1994, they went to revisit how true was Moore’s law they found it was not true, because it was not taking 18 months, it was even shorter than that, for the amount of power that could get on to a silicon wafer.
The second factor is all about connectivity. People in this country waited for years to get a line connection and to speak to somebody. For an overseas call, you waited for a call for nearly 8-10 hours before you can get connected. Look at the change that has happened today I have only one, but I am sure some of you here, at least few of you here have two phones in your pockets. That’s the accessibility to communication that has come to you. But more importantly, the speed at which this communication could happen we talked about 2G, then 3G, 4G and now 5G will be a reality very soon 4.5G is what we are implementing for a couple of our customers.
More importantly, if you look at this network, when people get connected the power of the network is not 1+1, it is an exponential number. So, if two people are in the network it is 1+1, the power of the network is 2 to the power of 2. How many people are in the network today there are 7.5 billion people in the world and 4.5 billion people are already on this network. But, equally important is that technology at this point in time, makes just not people to talk to each other, we are also talking to things. So, by 2020, our estimate is, this network will have 20 billion people and things together. What does it mean? The power of the network is now 20 billion to 20 billion computers will take time to crunch this information. That’s the second factor by which this fourth industrial revolution is growing at an exponential pace.
The third one are these ugly looking devices used to be there called ‘Sensors’, which were also expensive. What were they supposed to be doing? They could measure or sense many things. But what has happened to these sensors are applying the same Moore’s law they have become smaller and they are in a position to sense everything and anything that you can dream about. When we actually think about the five senses of the human being sight if perfected, we get images, which once it gets into a computer it can never forget that. The second is the sense of touch or the feel, is also perfected. The third is hearing or the sound is also becoming extremely good. Where we think is some work to be done, is in terms of smell and taste. But, now these sensors are coming in at amazingly low cost. At one point of time in the seventies, a resistor used to be $17 a piece, but now a sensor, which can measure temperature, flow, vibration, geo-positioning, and so on, altogether you can get 1700 of them in the same $17 cost. Interestingly what the sensors have done further is, they are putting tonnes of data people talked about kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes and there doesn’t seem to be an end. We have these sensors measuring the health of an aircraft engine, which in navigation is called Engine Health Monitoring System. What happens is, on a long haul flight, it puts about two teraflops of data on the computer systems, just to measure how healthy is the aircraft engine. So, you have this enormity of data that is coming in the third factor.
The fourth factor finally is all about the ability now to write algorithms, to get meaningfulness out of this data. People at one point of time said we needed structured data. Now, you don’t require structured data anymore, because the fuzziness in the data can also be understood by the computer. We can now write algorithms, which says let’s also talk about machines will start learning they start learning from what they are doing at this point of time. So, putting all these four factors together computers, communications, sensors and algorithms, are the big waves which are bringing in the fourth industrial revolution.
"what we see as the fourth industrial revolution, it has no barrier in the world so far, because the speed at which the change is coming about, has never been experienced by anybody, at any point of time"
This fourth industrial revolution is going to be far different from the rest of them, because it is now trying to combine the physical world, with the cyber world and the bio world. So, all of them will now start to communicate with each other. How will this impact us? The first and foremost is, this time unlike the past, technology will impact every potential area, which you can dream about. The type of impact that you are seeing in healthcare again in this point of time through technology, is again mindboggling. We have a company with an ICU bed, with traditional equipment which will cost you $100,000 that’s an average cost of an ICU bed. Using the new IoT technologies, you can now get it down to $10,000. So, you will look at the accessibility of technology to many more in the world. We will have an application in agriculture, which is to do with precision agriculture you determine what’s the health of the crop, what intervention is required, whether it is water, pesticide or fertilizer all this will happen through image processing, drones, thereafter AI algorithms, in agriculture. So, irrespective of which area you are in, you certainly are going to be impacted or the people who work with you will be impacted, with these new technologies.
The beauty of these technologies is, people like me have tremendous belief that while it will disrupt economies and certainly will bring about lot of change, but this time the change will also impact everybody and we have to ensure that it will bring social equality to the world. So, therefore it is good. We have certainly seen in the past too, whenever industrial revolutions happened, technology brought in economic impact, which means the GDP of the nation increased and the comforts for individuals improved dramatically. But, this time it will also bring social equality to people. So, the fourth industrial revolution is good for all of us.
What does the fourth industrial revolution mean to us in terms of life? Our life has changed the way in which I think, the way in which I behave, the way in which I communicate, the way in which I buy, the way in which I eat, all of them have changed. But, let’s look at it from your perspective as HR professionals, as to how does the future of work look like to me.
The first and the foremost is, the skills will change and will not be the same as what we had in the past. In every sector that we are thinking about, there will be a fairly large amount of jobs, which will get automated. And there will be an intervention, which will happen, because of new technologies technologies, which has to do with artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, 3D printing, machine learning and so on. All these technologies are different from what they are today.
Take for an example 3D printing there is a job role called 3D modeler and it basically designs products for us. And one of the things, including me-as mechanical engineering that we learnt in our lives-is that if you have a sharp curve on a product, the manufacturing ability becomes a challenge. Though we used what we call as ‘French curve’, the way in which wherever you liked to draw, they are there. But, we never were putting it into products, for the simple reason that manufacturing would become difficult and difficult would then translate to be expensive. While today, for 3D printing that description does not come into play anymore, because you deposit material there as required. So, now the skills that are required, the mindset that is required for a design engineer, is far different. The skills of the future are far different from the skills of the past.
"we have to create an environment to understand the current tech trends and start applying it. When you start applying it, you start questioning it and you have the ability to start challenging it"
The first challenge therefore you have, is making sure our workforce get skilled to the current technologies. Just as a data point, the IT and ITES industry, which NASSCOM represents at this point of time, employees four million professionals. Our estimate is that 50 per cent of these four million professionals, will require reskilling. So, the first area we have to look at is reskilling of our employees.
The second one is that you will also find the future of workplace is going to be far different. You will see that robots and people will have to work together. Psychologically, you can imagine what it is robots have taken away jobs of people, who are there right now. There are bots in the backend, which does all routine predictable jobs. So, therefore the workplace is going to be very different from what it was in the past.
We have also seen, if you look at some of the technologies or a simple thing like a smartphone, which all of you have you will find that there are several different technologies that have come in. It is not just an electronic gadget. It has the best of glass technology the front glass is unbreakable, which came from Corning, which came from military application around thirty years back. Because of mass production, they brought down the cost. For example, Apple is not just a mobile phone manufacturing company, it also has glass manufacturing technologies and capabilities. What we are seeing at this point of time is, it has become extremely interdisciplinary. You can’t have all the skills with one person, so the result is a collaborative work environment in the future. We will also see more amount of diversity in people and we have to show tremendous amount of flexibility that’s what we all need to look at the future of the workplace as such.
The third one is, let’s look at the future of the worker. For our colleagues including ourselves, what is it going to look like? These are all called the digital natives. If you look at India by 2020 - 22, over 64 per cent of the workforce will all be millennials. These people are saying that they are the digital natives. So, who am I, well, I am considered to be a digital alien. That’s what they all will think about you, if you don’t get updated with new technologies. These people were born in an age when social media was part and parcel of life. They can’t take their eyes off the screen, of their mobile phone or computer. And the consequence of this we have also seen yet another change that is happening is that they need instant gratification and they have several options. So, therefore the future is not going to be the same as the past, it is going to be far different. People will require more flexibility, they don’t like to be micromanaged. Therefore, the role you have as an HR manager or a leader, is going to be far more different than what was in the past.
We need to get into what is called as contextual thinking. We can’t say it was the past with me I have to be all the time living in the present, because the present is different from the past. It has changed quite dramatically. Therefore, unless I start living in the present, unless I keep challenging by saying, why is it’s happening this way, I will never get results. I will never build a company that has a leading edge. Therefore, we have to create an environment to understand the current tech trends and start applying it. When you start applying it, you start questioning it and you have the ability to start challenging it. So, the first challenge that you have is creating an environment which is contextual.
The second one is, we need to create more of emotional intelligence in people, because we need to now run processes of integrating the thoughts and feelings and relate them, just not for themselves but also for the people around it. It is not any longer that you have lots of time for people, to spend time with them in the cafeteria.
The third one is, we need more amount of inspired leadership, because in an environment which is changing so rapidly, unless we continuously inspire them, an inspiration to me will just not come from many things. Values to me are the one’s which would determine our behavior and our behavior then determines our culture. So, irrespective of what technology brings about as a change, we should definitely start looking at, more intensely, into the values we create in the environment.
And finally, the other challenge we will also find is the physical challenge people cannot be sitting all the time, in the places they have and that is not something which we can avoid. A desk has become the place of work for many people. Earlier if I wanted to read something I would go to a book shop, now I go and google on my phone. I have become lazy now, I don’t even touch my phone, I yell at Alexa. So, in this sedentary environment that we have, it is important that you as an HR professional, bring about a change in the physical environment. If you can’t bring a change in the physical environment, then at least make everybody very conscious about health.
The four things in the new regime that we will have are, make it very contextual by place, make them more emotional, bring about inspired leadership and create more amount of physical changes to make sure that they are all healthy.
One, we have to be responsive and equally, we have to be responsible, because the change is coming so rapidly, you have to respond to it, as there is no other choice. As we keep saying, if you don’t, somebody else will overtake you. Can you stop it? There is no way that you can stop it. You have to be there to respond to this big flood that is coming in, but make sure that every decision of yours, every action of yours, is responsive to this change. What can all of you do? Collectively work together in bringing about a change with people and I think that is what the HR professionals have to do bring about a shared sense of participation with every individual who is associated with us.
By Rajesh Rao
