Innovative Technology Leader

Chief data scientist, Mukund Shastri, the chief data science officer of Mahindra Comviva, has been in the IT Industry for more than two decades in building leadership to hands-on roles in machine learning, big data, blockchain and more. Shastri shares his personal exposure to the field of telecom business intelligence and analytics during an interview session with Corporate Citizen

How has the journey of life been? When was the calling for data science?

I did my graduation from NIT Nagpur in Mechanical engineering. I started from Nagpur by joining Tata Steel as a mechanical engineer. Tata Steel has plants in Jamshedpur and in Tarapur near Mumbai, where I worked for two years. I got an opportunity to work as the executive assistant to the senior vice president there which was at an early age of one-year experience. That was a good opportunity in terms of getting an overview of the entire organisation and also to know its flow of working. That was rare. Few of the others who joined with me from NIIT had a working experience at the engineering level, whereas I was doing ground work and also learning along with the president of the company to understand how the overall business process works. Taking that experience forward, further I joined Patni Computers in Mumbai in the year 1997 from where my journey of IT started. Patni Computers started to engage me in data warehousing and Y2K projects. That is where my data warehousing journey started.

Throughout my career what I have seen is that learning should never stop. I am a mechanical engineer and I am doing data science for tele-cooperators and also going for banking. What kept me on my career path better is my learn-ing adaptability. Every year I dedicate sometime for new learning. Right now I am completing my postgraduate diploma in machine learning from Amity University. Last year, I completed two courses from John Hopkins University in Machine Learning specialisation. In 2011, I was certified in big data technology from IBM. That is where my big data journey started. It doesn’t matter if you have the experience or not. The current experience can be applied to a new organisation and a new field, provided you add an input of knowledge. That has been my motto throughout my career which helped me reach Mahindra Comviva, where they appointed me as the head of technology initially, and now the Chief Data Science Officer. In 2016, the CEO took my interview and he asked me, “What do you want to do with Comviva? We do not have analytics with us. We are a very small product company.” I came up with a charter what I call magical and personal and it’s a presentation for Mr Mohapatra, showing him a roadmap. It was a charter for the next two years. That charter got updated every now and then and we are where we are currently. The charter said that I want to develop an analytics capability for Comviva and five customers who can develop revenue for comviva which will come in from data science. This was done from scratch. The initial one and a half years did not involve investment in terms of hiring lateral people. It was the freshers who joined in from colleges. I trained them on the machine learning technology, prepared and acquainted them on the telecom domain. After that I created business problems and interacted with multiple customers where I travelled a lot. I checked with each customer what problems they are having and understood those. Then I tried to create small POCs i.e. the proof of concept to prove to the customer if they can do it or not. Based on that the customer got convinced and now we have nearly five customers who are providing us with an opportunity to serve the night driving unit on data science which has a big path ahead.

In the next that’s the 2022 path roadmap that we have, the goal is to become a 100 million USD mobility business. In that the business will grow from scratch to a 10 million USD.

As a leader, what is the vision that you follow and would also want others to follow, in the future of your field?

I have been guiding myself internally that I have to be a leader on the technology front. The longterm goal is to become a chief technology officer in a large-sized company. Everyone should have a goal which should be aligned with the capabilities that they have. You have to strategise your career in such a way by looking at what you are the best fit for. I am not a management leader but a technology leader who is good at it. Thus, I will follow that theme inside out. Even the new generation which comes in has to think through and do an introspection. Technology, Management, Marketing, Interacting or Convincing people are the kind of jobs. I cannot convince people but I can convince them on technology. So I know my boundaries and so should everyone, knowing what they are good at. Use that for building the career.

“What kept me on my career path better is my learning adaptability. Every year I dedicate sometime for new learning”

Any incident which told you that you are good at technology?

When I joined Capgemini in 2010, I had an opportunity to join Walmart India or Capgemini. I realised that I have picked up Telecom better and I am a technologist. The opportunity at Capgemini was the head of Telecom Analytics. That is a core subject which I love. So I joined Walmart and told the authorities within a period of two months that I cannot do this work. And then I came back to Capgemini and told them that I want you because that is where my portfolio and career path suits towards.

How do you maintain a human touch in today’s advancing world of technology?

Every time a new technology comes in, we say that people will lose their job. Even if technology like artificial intelligence is evolving, you need people who are even more specialised who maintain and handle that technology. Right now, machine learning and deep learning has come into the market, but there are also products which are coming in to maintain that. So there is an opportunity around it. People may lose jobs because artificial intelligence is taking over their jobs, but the same people, if they have an adaptability to learn something new they can adjust on the technologies around it where it needs support for something like AI. So, people are not losing jobs but they have to upgrade themselves in order to cope up with the new generation of technology. Thus, the human touch will always revolve around the technology.

What is architectural leadership?

Let’s take the meaning of architecture in its generic sense. It is a building block for anything you want to build. If I have to build a new build-ing I need architecture because I need the design. We need architecture because we have to reduce the cost of failure. If I don’t design any-thing today and build without thinking, tomorrow, there will be issues in terms of its fitment, usage and others. In order to avoid that, an architectural leader needs to have a design knowledge and he is the key for any development, be it software, real estate, architecture, or any other type. He is going to reduce the cost of owner-ship for the upcoming product of any variant. Architecture leadership must be imbibed in the new generation. Secondly, it is the need of the hour. Like how we have people who implement technology, we need people who design technology as well.

“Everyone should have a goal which should be aligned with the capabilities that they have. You have to strategise your career in such a way by looking at what you are the best fit for”

You have travelled across US, Singapore, India. What are the different experiences? Are people on the right path? How do you see people evolving?

In the architectural leadership, technology and data sciences area, India is growing faster. I travelled to Hong Kong but the Uber app was not available there. There was no Ola equivalent there whereas in India, I have two such applications. In Morocco, there is only Uber and no equivalent. That means that the people are lacking in the innovation area which is the key feature of India. The new generation technologies are implementing the solutions quickly. That is where our government is also supporting the startup India initiatives and one man companies. This is where one can open their startup with a new idea and implement. The Food Panda and Ola apps have started from scratch. That is happening in India. If you travel to the other regions, you do not find the innovation happening to that extent, except for the regions like Germany, UK, and few parts of USA.

You will find that Indians are on a very high scale technology front like data science. Germany is growing in the manufacturing sector of innovations, but on the softer part, they are lacking somewhere, where, you find many Indian engineers and data scientists working in Germany and the UK. So there is a demand for Indian talent in such places.

I would like to thank the Indian education system which is not like UK or US. I have worked in UK for five years and also have seen my kids studying there in the UK. There the education system is very blunt and soft. Here, once the kid is three years old he starts studying. Even if we have infrastructural problem in India, the students do not get a practical exposure to the concepts they learn, we Indians mug up the concept. But that mugged up concept in the out-side industry works wonders and the people say that this guy is brilliant as he knows the theory. India because of its economy is just not able to implement the theory to the practical. One gets this opportunity in the foreign countries. Hence Indian engineers and CEOs are growing faster in the global companies. A concluding thought is, I feel that Indians should not change the method by which they are learning, but add to it in terms of practical exposure.

“Manufacturing is lacking in its automations. Using the data sciences etc., the costs can be reduced with increase in the capability of the labour to take the high level jobs”

A message for the upcoming people in the industry. What should be a roadmap for the upcoming leaders? Describe a picture.

I will start with the growing domains. First is regular as you see a lot of e-commerce portals. Telecom is now going for the next generation along with its value added services. For example, the reliance Jio Fibre. Telecom is the fastest evolving market. Every two years you have a next generation evolving technology on the bandwidth area. If a smartphone is coming under the telecom industry, what else should one do in it is what one should focus on. So it’s mainly retail and telecom. Banking can also grow but I cannot say much about it as I do not have much visibility there.

The third sector, last but not the least is manufacturing. In India, we have the Make in India initiative, which is going to grow the manufacturing sector faster. Unless we grow we will not achieve the three trillion economy goal made by the government. Manufacturing has boosted Germany, China and the US. On the same lines, India needs to focus, taking the help of the initiatives from the government and the manufacturing sector. Our new generation technologists should also focus on what one can do for the manufacturing domain. We have to think innovatively there, just like we are improving the retail and food chain domain.

Manufacturing is lacking in its automations. Using the data sciences etc., the costs can be reduced with increase in the capability of the labour to take the high level jobs. This will also increase the quality of the products that are coming out of the manufacturing sector which can be used by India and abroad. Abroad they see what is the defect propensity or percentage that your product has. If you are selling some kind of wire rods, across the length of five km wire rods, is there any variation by the diameter that you are going? That variation should be as minimum as possible. Unless we have this technology, which is supported by software technology, to control the optimised output, it will not happen. Thus technology also should be focused on manufacturing in addition to telecom and retail. This is one area.

The second part is about technology. What are the technologies which are most growing? We now see that AI is going to take over entirely with its speed in the next 20 years. A lot of applications are developing. I see my kids at home using my phone and all the sorts of things that they are doing. A farmer from a village today is coming to me and telling me to put a camera in the farm so that I can view what is growing while being in another city. That is how people are also getting acquainted to the use of technology. If a farmer can know the use of technology, this can be implemented all across. In addition to that there are the supporting technologies, one of which is Block Chain.

Today’s internet is not secure. Anyone can see anything that you write. Block chain says that I will share my information to the person I want to share it to and that nobody else will see it. Reliance Jio started using it at the DOC level. It will flourish vastly in the telco and other domains. Block chain is going to be a big threat for banking systems. Right now, we have highly costly ‘core’ banking systems implemented in the banks. Block chain says that it does not need this system. If I am making a payment to you, that payment will be tracked via block chain system. You do not need costly hardware and software to support it. Thus these systems have chances of being wiped out with block chain. This will reduce the cost of ownership of the total IT sys-tems inside the banks and make it secure.