Enterprises of Tomorrow – Hybrid, Flexible and Leveraging Technology — will expand the Work Force

Prateek was with the Tata Group for over 20 years in senior leadership positions. Including at Tata Teleservices and Tata communications. Prateek was the chairman of the Wireless Broadband Alliance, a global body and on the board of the WiMAX forum, the global standard for fixed wireless broadband. He is an adventure sports enthusiast, a squash player, and an avid cyclist.

V&D: The pandemic was nothing short of a Black Swan event. It changed lives for both corporates and individuals in multiple ways. What is your view has this done to enterprises, especially for the work-from-home situation.

Prateek Pashine: The pandemic has truly tested the human spirit. It forced us to think out of the box and create solutions for the continuity of business. Every corporate has a BCP - business continuity plan. Before COVID, that meant two things. One was to ensure disaster recovery and safety of your data centers (separated by distance and location) and the core data. The other was not to allow the top two or three senior leaders to travel together on the same plane. There wasn’t much else. COVID showed how inadequate this BCP was. It wasn’t any longer about the CEO or CFO. If employees cannot come to work, and cannot be connected to the resources or infrastructure that the company provides, then that was a serious BCP issue.

It is no longer about flying on the same plane it is about how to make sure that each and every employee can work. That was, I think, the first rude shock. Companies were ill-prepared. For example in the call center industry, every desktop accommodates two or three agents who come in shifts. One desktop is used multiple times. Now, when agents couldn’t come to work, enterprises had to provide for three instead of one. The ratio of workstations to employees multiplied.

But the blessing has been technology. Companies that adopted technology faster, we're able to take advantage and make it a seamless, borderless, BCP secure organization. There are some great examples of how companies were able to immediately use technology to tide over the pandemic.

Soon you will see everything as a service. You are going to see new models emerging, moving from capex led decisions to platform / service led.

I’ll give you our example, at Jio, we have about 6000 employees who handle 450 million mobile customers. Most of them were working out of call centers or corporate offices. Overnight, 6000 employees had to start working from home. We did this without a blip in services. Only because of the smart use of technology. On the reverse side, the impact on approximately 75 million small businesses in our country was the hardest. Those who were not able to leverage technology went out of business. We saw close to 10 million businesses shutting shop.

V&D: The pandemic hit just when these core building blocks of technology, like 4G networks of Jio, broadband services, and smartphone devices were beginning to be widely used. How do you think these different elements came together.

Prateek Pashine: You’ve asked a very interesting question. If this pandemic had happened a decade earlier, I’m not sure we would have fared that well. It was a great combination of technologies, ubiquitous broadband, and 4G networks covering pretty much all villages and towns, and cities that Jio enabled from 2016 onwards. It was a perfect combination, which enabled us to tide over this event. I dread to imagine how it would have been if these enablers were not in place.

V&D: This helped the employees to connect. What about the network operators? Did it impact your role outs. What was the impact on your own employees as an Enterprise?

Prateek Pashine: I’ll talk about the shift that’s happening. Whether you call it reverse migration from the Enterprise hotspots – places like a Nehru Place in Delhi or a DLF Cyber Hub in Gurgaon or Nariman Point / Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) in Mumbai. That’s where enterprises were located. And Service Providers concentrated on in terms of rolling out networks and coverage. Even sales and support staff were focused in those hotspots. But now these are no longer hotspots. As employees went back to work from home, the hotspots shifted. It’s not Nehru Place, but probably GK-II or Rohini in Delhi. It’s not BKC, but Goregaon or Ghatkopar in Mumbai. Now it is not an Enterprise strategy, but a home strategy – we are rolling out ubiquitous broadband in every nook and corner of the country, starting with 1600 towns. Those who had a very coherent strategy of fiber to the home actually have been beneficiaries. And when we go back to a hybrid way of working, these hotspots will come back into the Enterprise clusters. So ubiquitous coverage is one of my key elements of the new normal. This shift of hotspots has also meant that all the rules, norms, security, privacy have now become important, not just for the corporate clusters but for the 2000 residential homes of their employees. That’s where the data is getting transacted.

Each home is now an office premise. We are having very interesting conversations with our customers. Earlier their conversations with enterprises were about SLA, uptime, and redundancy, in those office locations. Today, the enterprises have started saying can you give me SLA on my employee's home connection.

Can you give me redundant connectivity, one fiber, one 4G?

Those conversations you wouldn’t have imagined happening just two or three years back. Earlier people talked about software-defined wide-area networks SDWAN limited to those clusters. People are now saying can I have the software-defined networks and services extended to my home. It will transform the CIO conversations.

It’s also going to lead to not just a hybrid way of working but hybrid networks as well. And I think that it augurs well, for the enterprises. Because earlier, the enterprises were spending far higher money in creating what you call VPN networks. Now, with the shift, what you basically want to say is, bring your own internet, I will put the security protocols, I’ll put the traffic prioritization protocols on top of that. It doesn’t matter that in some locations, it’s a fiber connectivity in some locations, 4G, in some locations, it’s a home connection, all of these get federated through one unified security layer, one unified, prioritization layer that gets managed by the Enterprise. I think that is the joy for any CIO because you’re no longer tethered to that one service provider. Now, connectivity, connectivity can come from any source, I can apply that layer of control. And that’s going to be one big shift.

V&D: This is basically the distributed enterprise. But as this reaches the employees’ homes, there are likely to be challenged in managing the technology. Be it simply fixing an email or a laptop crash. There is no tech support at hand. Are there any interesting situations of this nature cropping up?

Prateek Pashine: I think you bring a very important aspect of what’s going to happen. The journey had started but got accelerated with the pandemic. And that’s everything moving as a service. I don’t want just a laptop, I want to support it as well. I don’t want just some software, I want it to be managed and supported. And I think soon you will see everything as a service. As you rightly said, how do I provide that technology support? On one premise, I could have two support staff. But now you have to provide remote infrastructure management. Now we are seeing Enterprises asking if we can manage it — don’t just be a supplier just manage the whole thing. I’m in the core business of banking, I’m in the core business of textile manufacturing, manage my infrastructure for me. Can we bring all of these together as service? This impacts one other problem that a CIO worries about — technology obsolescence. Upfront capex is not an easy decision. Everything as a service solves that problem. So that is fundamentally the shift that you’re seeing of device as a service, connectivity as a service, Infra as a service. You are going to see new models emerging, moving from capex-led decisions to platform / service-led.

V&D: Working from home has actually been a boon for many employees. People have more time, they don’t need to commute for four hours a day. How has it impacted workers? How has it helped you personally to spend more time on things other than work?

Prateek Pashine: This work from anywhere has opened up new avenues for people who had to opt out of the regular workforce. For example, there are graduate and postgraduate mothers, who are not able to step out because they’ve got young kids. But they have time, say four or five hours in a day. That can be gainfully used, their skills can be leveraged. And that has completely democratized and made the workforce more inclusive.

You no longer need somebody who’s coming in five days a week, eight hours a day. If I have talent and capability, 25 hours in a week is better than 40 hours. There are millions of such jobs. So the contract between employee and employer is changing.

It’s no longer one monolithic, rigid contract. And this is real. We’ve deployed about 20,000, such hitherto, not in the mainstream workforce, mostly women in Jio. Some can work three days a week or a few hours a day. We train them using digital technologies and then let them manage our customer relationships. We found 20,000 talented people just like that. And it didn’t matter whether they are in Mumbai or Bhopal. This is a challenge to the CHROs of companies – they have to think of flexible models. Is a 20-year-old person full-time better than a very experienced person who can give only three hours a day? The pandemic has unleashed a new workforce.

Productivity has also gone up. People have extra time for family, Health, and hobbies.

But the flip side is – as one CEO of a Philippine company said — you can close deals remotely, and win contracts but what about relationships? Relationships can’t be built remotely. Face-to-face interaction is equally important. There is also a sense of belongingness to the organization. Whether it’s the institution, the premises, the canteen conversations, waiting in queue for lunch or coffee, the two minutes with a colleague at their desk all of these are equally important. So I think we will ultimately move to a hybrid model.

I’ve personally claimed three and a half hours of commute time back. A large chunk of that has gone into cycling and health.

V&D: What is your view, are the tools and platforms that will dominate in the future for this kind of a hybrid enterprise of tomorrow?

Prateek Pashine: Technology is a great catalyst for reducing the hurdles that small and medium businesses faced earlier. It truly gives them a plank to compete with large Enterprises. For us, both the large enterprise and the small, proprietor-run, founder-run, businesses are important for enabling technology. What does an organization need? You need productivity tools, you need marketing tools to reach your customer. You need CRM for customer data records, you need an accounting and you need HR.

If I can bring these solutions to the company in everything as a service manner to be the glue, that brings it all together then the digital divide would be significantly reduced. We at Jio are truly trying to be a digital enabler at a cost that is easy to manage. We are removing the technology constraint for SMEs.

Prateek Pashine, President – Enterprise – at Reliance Jio shared insights on the Enterprise of tomorrow and the changing workplace in a conversation with Gajendra Upadhyay, Editor, Voice & Data.