Today I was a member in a panel discussion on “IT World – India’s Lead Sustainable”. The programme was part of Synapse ’05 organized by Department of Management Studies – School of Management, Pondicherry University in partnership with CII. I had the opportunity to share the dais with:
- Dr. Kuppu Swamy S, Dean- Ramanujam School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Pondicherry University
- Mr. Punit Dhandhania, VP – Strategy & Business Development, SPI Publisher services
- Mr. Subramanyan N K, Head – Banking & Financial Services, BirlaSoft
- Mr. Shankar Krishnamoorthy, VP – Aspire Systems
Though I had to spend a day (Started the day before from Chennai and stayed overnight for the next day morning programme) on travel for a 15 minute presentation, it was quite motivating to participate in the programme. I could get to listen to others from Industry and to the students.
I am normally very curious and interested in hearing from students (the Potential managers) as they come with a new perspective, a fresh approach and not clouded by industry experience. Even here the students had interesting questions on the Resource Utilization that is reported by IT Companies in their Quarterly results (For Example: INFY Recently reported 78%, will it become 100% ever?). Then there was the usual question on India improving on the product space – I answered what I believe to be one of the reasons that is Indian’s are normally risk averse especially the urban Indian middle class (who presently dominate the IT Services Industry). Dr.T.Nambirajan from the faculty raised a relevant issue of depleting health condition of individuals working in IT due to work pressure and night shifts.
Nowadays as an audience I avoid attending these panel discussions as I believe you get very little useful information – because of the fact the time given to a speaker to express his views are very limited (< 15 mins). On top of it the organizers get many speakers, the moderator taking most of the time in re explaining what was already told, the first few speakers overshooting there time multifold, each speaker speaking the same point or rehashing what is known to everyone – like you don’t need a speaker to say that India’s Export Turnover in IT last year was $XY Billion the audience have assess to the same Nasscom/STPI report on the Internet. Hopefully today was different and the audience got some tiny bit useful information. I suggested to the organizers the next time to improve things in their invite letters to panelists they can give a list of things that need not be covered – list of things/figures/backgrounds the audience already know. Also a template of the presentation format they are expecting from the speakers for 15 minutes.
I wish good luck to the students of the batch and thank the organizers for inviting me.
Download the Presentation I used it world – india’s lead sustainable.ppt (172.5 KB)