CIO Leadership Live India with Debashis Singh, CIO, Persistent Systems
hi everyone welcome to CIO leadership live I am katar Kent strategist at Foundry and I will be your host for this episode Our Guest today is daishi Singh CIO persistent systems uh dhis it is a pleasure to have you with us for this edition of CIO leadership live absolute pleasure to be here thank you so much for having me here thank you uh let's get into it deis uh could you tell us a little bit about your role at responsibility at persistent and what is a current significant Focus area uh to scale information security at your company sure two questions I'll take first one first so as the global CIO the responsibility is more or less similar across the industry to ensure that your information your data your intelligence and of course the required enablement from the technology perspective is aligned to the organization goal and it is really giving that age over your competition to grow at the rate we are growing today as you know persistent is definitely doing much better in terms of growth compared to the industry and that definitely has created certain areas for Focus for us to cope up with that growth so that is the highest priority for me as we speak uh I as you know I have joined uh persistent around a Year back and with priorities focusing on complete digital transformation ensuring that all the systems all the tools and the data part is kind of stitched together to enable our growth that was the first part of it enabling the growth part second of course ensuring that collaboration piece which is in the current time we all know people are working in a hybrid environment distributed across the globe so ensuring that you have the right platform right system which enable this collaboration occurs and give a seamless experience to employees so that they focus on the customer delivery side of it so that was second and the third piece which is pretty pertinent in today's world is a cyber security and as we all know uh with uh I mean pandemic coming in people going out of the perimeter there is no defined way of working right people connect from home connect from hotel when they travel and so on so forth so that essentially means your data is floating all over right so you have to ensure wherever they are they are protected and the required assurance and that confidence is given back to your stakeholders be it your internal leadership board members investor and on top of that your customers so that is the biggest challenge for all all cios and that those are the priorities I drive now understood and very well put uh collaboration cyber security and essentially ensuring that all your stakeholders are on board certainly every cio's responsibility thank you thank you for summarizing that uh my next question is uh you know with technology updating at such a rapid Pace staying up to date can be quite a challenge how are you assessing emerging technologies that everyone's talking about like AI ML and internet of things or iot and how are you looking at their integration in your existing Solutions great question in today's world can we imagine having an Enterprise environment without AIML I don't think so every single Enterprise you will touch upon every single solutions that is available in the market you implement there will be certain component of machine learning certain component of artificial intelligence comes along with it and let's to look at why it is so uh I think we spoke about distributed computing people kind of going across uh the perimeter operating from anywhere having that state being The New Normal uh it what it does it is generating huge amount of data earlier your data was all inside the perimeter now it is all over the place so as you collate it and with the kind of collaboration tools and systems coming in the dependence on data has gone really multifold and in a real life Enterprise environment if you really want to use the data to bring the intelligence out of it is it I can can we think about a time uh where it is possible manually answer is uh no way it is possible manually so we have to use the Technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to kind of get the intelligence out of it so it is uh in today's Enterprise world it is part of it it is part of every single system every single tool in addition to that if you look at the focus on employee experience or customer experience uh has gone multifold uh and that is again a driver due to pandemic what happened people went back and they started operating from home all the time so your consumer application and Enterprise environment if you look at that barrier which used to be there in the past that disappeared so the expectation from the employees and consumer is that I want one experience irrespective of Enterprise or consumer side so earlier consumer side was only treated for experience and Enterprise was to do your job that is no more and if you to drive that experience you have to bring that intelligence out of your system and the intelligence comes out of the data and so on so forth and to drive that you need systems which is enabled and capable of running uh AI enabled algorithm to give you the right Insight so that you work and take it and a uh kind of create Solutions and models which help employees to really deliver services so that is that is what is driving the trend and it is going to continue and the latest uh version that is the uh generative AI uh which is of course I mean I'm really looking forward it is going to change the way we deliver Services we work in our environment in our office even otherwise it is completely going to change everything so that is that is part of our life part of our new life absolutely I think uh the customer experience employee experience shifting that you spoke about is very integral because the boundaries between workplace and home and thus the experience that is related to these two places has completely blurred correct yeah U definitely uh you know moving from emerging Technologies to another very potent area data privacy which is emerging as a m major concern for organizations especially as they go digital and hybrid or remote so what cyber security measures and compliance Frameworks are you leveraging uh to protect against data breaches and any unauthorized access for your clients essentially to safeguard them sure for a global organization like persistent uh as we operate from different geographies our customers are spread across the go there are different regulatory requirement for each go and on top of that we do service customers from bfsi as well as Healthcare and they are heavily regulated so that brings the focus on data privacy and security more than the other Industries and if you look at our overall cyber uh resilience framework uh based on the standard nist and other models that is available but what we do on top of that is we look at holistically from end to to end we do not see it that this is the responsibility of Technology this is the responsibility of security organization this is the responsibility HR and so on so forth rather we look at as an combined responsibility and drive it starting from uh uh detect protect and uh ensure that we are uh ready for any kind of respond and uh restoration right so bringing all the uh component together so we put the best of the technology to ensure we are able to detect it quicker that is the first stage in just in case there is possibilities because today's world there are highly sophisticated very very targeted attacks which is happening and that is always a catchup game right so there is a possibility that you might get compromised or maybe one single device was not updated due to whatever the reason may be and that got compromised so how you ensure that is protected that the data inside that device and it doesn't move is stand voice from what you say within the organization so there is a protection layer for that so we bring the best of the Technologies around it again and the good part is there are solutions available in the industry uh and if we configure it correctly we can definitely limit to a large extent such uh kind of spread then in terms of putting the right framework and what we did that persistent is we created a complete Playbook playbooks starting from incident reporting then reaction towards the incident treatment including our uh legal advisors our insurance agencies and so on so forth so we brought everybody together and created a very very uh holistic uh Playbook which covers any kind of situations that might happen we are prepared to handle that and we share those details with our customers as well to bring that confidence that we are doing the right thing to deal with that data so that's always a journey it continues it is never a destination but I I'm sure we are prepared enough and we are continuously working to ensure our customer information data are protected and the Privacy is protected all the time understood and uh great response your uh when you mentioned the Playbook and essentially the confidence that you have in that and the clients are having that confidence as well that indicates that you are prepared for every challenge that may come up because privacy challenges are ad hoc like you mentioned hackers are getting smarter by the days yes um so you know you seem to have a really good grasp on your role as a CIO and uh uh that makes you very pivoted in your organization to in driving digital transformation uh you're essentially the spear head of digital transformation so what according to you does the future of it look like in the technological Services industry such as yours and how is persistent preparing to adapt to Contin techn ological you know advancements perfect uh and a great question again uh the way I see it and that's my view uh I mean maybe uh qu can be questioned or can be debated but my view is technology is going to be simpler and transparent in future doesn't mean it is simpler from the core Tech perspective it will be simpler from consumer perspective from the employee perspective from customer perspective right so while it will be and second part I said transparent that I don't have to really struggle about how it is really working let me give you a few examples why I'm saying what I'm saying U as you know document classification is the base for treating data uh uh data protection in many organizations right and that is one of the best practice around it and how ised to happen in the past people used to as an author as an creator of a document I create a document and then I decide this document is as a confidential document or is an internal to my organization or it can be shared with my customer or it will be a public document anybody can consume it that is the normal way of life we used to have it with AI coming in AI engine decides that you don't have to worry about whether you have classified it correctly or that is a human error so from user perspective from a from a consumer perspective technology is becoming simpler right it is becoming transparent because AI is taking the decision in the back end and applying the rules and ensuring when the data is going out either it is encrypted or going out the required protection that you need very very simple and that is what it explains and you will see Sim SAR way technology is coming in practically every single space that we work let's talk about data and data is a large uh kind of I mean we say today data is the new oil and if you look at uh the intelligence that we talking about everything is derived from data but look at the size of data we are talking about not terabytes anymore petabytes of data and this volume of data if I'm analyzing and getting the intelligence out of it that intelligence which is again AI enabled or J enabled that is what is playing the cards in the back end as a consumer I just go and type hey give me a view of so my Revenue pipeline for next three months between $1 million to $10 million so this I just type a simple request very very simple without any script anything and in the backend system goes looks at this pite of data in the back end and gets me the exact specific answer which is relevant to me based on the access level that I have and the level of information that I need so from the user perspective again it is becoming simpler yeah take wise it is becoming complex in the back end but that is completely in the back end right but from the consumer standpoint and the way I use it to in the earlier era I have to open five applications then drop down three to four different parameters then arrive at this particular data point today I'm just asking a simple question and getting the all answer in front of me so that is what I'm saying technology will become transparent it will become simpler from the consumer perspective while the complexity will all move towards the back end so that is the future I see and I see it happening very very soon in few couple of hour years from now yes I I think I would also uh you know agree with you to a certain extent on that front because the more complex it gets in the back end the more user interfacing part of it feels simple effortless like you don't need to remember every fact you don't need to press more buttons know more codes otps all of that gets dist to one click or two clicks and that is probably what the future of it is moving towards uh yes one final question for you dhis um you know like you mentioned gen Ai and it's the way it's getting implemented in every organization uh these days so but with over Reliance on jna also emerge concerns especially those in the hearts of employees so do you feel like something like jna and chat GPT threatened to cause job losses in the IT industry and if that is if that is true what then becomes the traits of human talent that you really look for you know the sort after sort of talent the ones with the the crem DEA Creme of skill set so to speak and and when you find human Talent like that what do you do to spot it and to retain it perfect real challenge for the industry but very simple answer here uh we live in a world which is very fast changing around us from a technology standpoint having said that if technology is changing skill set has to change as well so who are the critical PE resources that you are relying on those resources who are ready to adapt and learn new technologies if I'm great on one technology today three to six months down the line I may not be great anymore and maybe one year or two years down the line I may be completely completely obsolete right if I'm ready to learn train myself and acquire new skills then I'm relevant and these are the people these are the resources these are the skill set of resources that you should Target for return return them at any cost who are ready to learn new things and apply those learning in the real life that is the first one uh going back to the first part of the question is it going to impact employability or it is going to imp impact job loss uh the way I see it probably more jobs are getting created than the number of job jobs which is possibly getting wiped due to jni right uh those jobs which were possibly uh very mundan in nature or can be derived with a defined logic or defined set of query that is what is getting obsolete that is what is probably becoming redundant in the system but more complex core technology skill sets and the uh resource requirement M are really getting created all over every single Enterprise today is in the path of jna implementation that essentially means there is requirement of right skilled resources who can handle this kind of jobs those kind of requirements so it is a shifting from one skill set to other skill set and the new requirement which is coming our way which is much much larger compared to what used to be in the past so I I mean I don't believe it is a a uh negative Trend rather it is a positive trend we just need to get aligned and understand that skill sets are changing we need to change ourself we need to acate those new skills we need to upgrade ourselves and align to the new requirements so it is the that is the way to look forward as long as that is aligned in people's mind they are the resources which has to be rained at any cost in the organization uh you have a really positive uh you know optimistic outlook on the whole Genna thing I feel like every CIO speak to has a different answer a different leaning based on everything that they've seen but this perspective certainly stands and you're talking about adaptability is the most crucial skill you're looking for whether it is about gen or it is about the sought after Talent if they're adaptable if they're willing to learn you would place your bet on them absolutely that's that's great Dees thank you so much for all of your perspectives uh that brings me to the end of this episode of CIO leadership life uh divish I would like to take this opportunity to thank you especially for sharing all your valuable insights on the changing CIO role the emergence of you know new or more complex technology and how it's going to make customers and employees lives simpler and how your expectations are thus uh you know increasing from them as well this has been a very enlightening conversation and very enlightening I'm sure for our viewers too thank you so much for having me here it was great talking to you thank you so much thank you very much uh thank you everybody uh for those who watched it until next time this is kirat signing off from CIO leadership live
2023-10-09 06:16
