Building a Research Agenda on People Related Challenges to Technology Organisations
Volume 19, Number 3 Article by Vasanthi Srinivasan September, 2007
Building a Research Agenda on People Related Challenges to Technology Organisations: Discussion :
The phenomenal growth of the IT industry in the last two decades has brought with it a unique set of human resource challenges. While there is anecdotal data available from the industry on the subject, empirical literature is sparse. In a bid to identify the key research questions which have implications for the industry, IIMB Management Review invited a panel of practitioners and academics to discuss the relevant issues pertaining to people management challenges in environments mediated intensely by information, communication and technology.
The encouraging growth rates of the Indian economy, Shantanu Saha, CEO, Idiom Design and Consulting emphasised, would become meaningful depending on how quickly can we make our workforce future-ready. We must identify the market-shaping trends in the industry and then design our organisations and institutions of learning around them. Speaking from the perspective of a globally integrated enterprise, Kalpana Margabandhu, Director, IBM Application and Integration Middleware Division, said that IBM’s focus on accelerated learning and continuous development, its brand worth and its values are realised through the Career Progression Framework, Career Roadmaps and mentorship programmes modelled to suit Indian conditions. The company also has specific programmes to build relationships with the community, with universities and schools, for teacher development and for sustainable education models, which will contribute eventually in building the pipeline for the company.
V R Katti, Programme Director, Indian Space Research Organisation Satellite Centre, spoke of the challenges of managing people engaged in hi-tech research of a sensitive nature in today’s globalised environment, within the requirements of a government set-up. The challenges include revitalising the organisation’s recruitment options which have shrunk from the pick of the crop to ‘whoever is willing to join’, providing training, development, a career growth chart and rewarding highly motivated people, organising individualistic teams for coordinated efforts, and resolving inter-personal and inter-group conflicts on technical matters. ISRO has risen to the challenge of competition brought in by globalisation, by offering very competitive launch costs and costs of satellites, leading to several foreign collaborations – efforts which have kept ISRO’s attrition rate at below industry averages.
Pallab Bandyopadhyay, Chief People Officer, Cambridge Solutions, emphasised the importance of creating an organisation with ‘soul’, of work-life balance, and the need for organisational policies on retention and rewards to be socially relevant. Bringing a comparative view from Silicon Valley, Ranjan Sinha, Chairman and CEO, Summit HR Worldwide, emphasised the right leadership, innovative and cutting edge technology, and a culture focused on retention as essential to win the war for talent. Leadership skills, according to Cabot Jaffee, CEO, Alignmark, must be taught, documented and evaluated in our educational institutions as that will be the differentiator. Prof E S Srinivas, XLRI, Jamshedpur called attention to the emerging areas in organisational behaviour and behavioural science research that are contributing to the area of positive people management, and for research to move beyond measurement and assessment to development.
The leads for research on people related challenges in hi-tech environments were summed up by Prof Vasanthi Srinivasan as: context–specific people management practices; shifting the balance from micro issues to the larger, macro organisational context; and the extent to which changes and transformation in societies have had an impact on people management practices.
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