Upskill, or be prepared to opt out, Dell CIO tells techies

Bask Iyer, CIO and Executive Vice-President of Dell and VMware, believes IT folks must surf the oncoming technology waves all the time and continue to upskill themselves or be prepared to opt out of IT altogether. In a freewheeling chat with BusinessLine , he spells out how IT professionals can make themselves relevant in times when layoffs are the order of the day. Edited excerpts:

With Cloud becoming an overarching feature of IT infrastructure today, will IT workforces be reduced to one-fourth of what they used to be?

The value of IT to companies is growing as we speak. However, if IT is doing the same thing that it was doing 18 months ago, IT workforces will definitely be reduced. Thirty years ago, you had a mainframe computer doing your financial closure — that’s all you had. I’ve witnessed the transformation of IT, which now runs everything in the company. So if a techie says he is a mainframe programmer, he or she won’t have a job today. The need of the hour is to upskill — ride the right technology waves, change and shift with the oncoming technology waves, much like surfing. Techies must use and get familiar with new technologies, and sometimes guess what it is much ahead of time. The non-technical definition of Cloud for me is that, if you have a lot of people, then you don’t have a Cloud, because it should be heavily automated. If you had 10 data centres and 1,000 IT people, and after transitioning to Cloud, if you still have 10 data centres and 1,000 IT people, that means you haven’t really gone to Cloud at all.

After the Dell-EMC merger, how many IT folks did you lay off and how many have been reskilled?

I am making sure that all my IT folks are best equipped to generate revenues rather than lay them off. People without the skill-sets to go ahead to the next level in a company will go anyway, that’s just the way it is. As for reskilling, no organisation provides for that because even they don’t know what to train employees on. Who will reskill me for instance? My job has changed every year over the last 30 years — I started off as a technical person in a business running cables and networking. Now, I am CIO of Dell and VMware. In VMware I’m talking about mobile transformation and when I switch over to Dell mode, I’m talking about integration. My job as a CIO is very dynamic, where I have to keep changing and upskilling myself all the time. If I don’t, the CEO will start looking for someone who can strategise about the future state of where digital transformation will take the company; because in his mind, Bask Iyer is very good at running systems but he is not a thought leader.

With growth rates of the Indian IT services industry falling year-on-year, do you think its glorious run is reaching an end?

The majority of the IT industry, everywhere in the world, is very conservative and that’s why their growth levels are dropping. While one cannot be careless, one needs to have a healthy appetite for risk and change; if not, one has no business being in IT. While Indian IT has gotten sophisticated since the Y2K era with ERP (enterprise resource planning) backoffice work, engineering design and simulation work, etc, being done out of here, this labour arbitrage game goes only so far. So if IT does not deliver high value-added work, no organisation will hire thousands of techies to do what could be automated with a computer, even for a cheap price.

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