What would the ‘Managers’ manage in the age of AI?

Would you need a PMP certified manager to manage a workforce in the age of bots and Artificial Intelligence?

The times are a changin. A mere 5 years ago, typical job description for an IT manager used to surely contain people management & process mapping as key skills, with a little bit of technology knowledge as a plus. The usual project management certifications were considered as icing on the cake. A resume with 5–7 years of experience managing couple of projects with people management skills and PMP certification used to be sort of sureshot succcess in job market. But are those skills really required in today’s scenario infested with chatbots, AI and Neural network? Quite a lot of discussions are happening around the new skills required for succeeding in the IT service industry, which definitely requires technology knowledge as mandatory instead of a mere plus. However not much has been talked about the IT managers on the consumer side. The IT managers on the end user industry have a difficult life ahead too.

To start with, the end user industry IT managers are always under pressure to maintain Opex, if not to reduce it YoY. So far, the supporting logic behind maintaining Opex has been — once you buy a piece of licensed software or a hardware, you need to continue the cycle of AMC, which holds a major part of the Opex budget. This scenario is now open for disruption.

Suddenly areas in Operations, Support and other repetitive jobs are under the scanner. The scope of changing the operational model is opening up rapidly. The traditional IT jobs like system maintenance, user management wont require a manual support going forward. Any and every such repititive tasks are going to be possible cadidates for automation, thanks to the immense progress on AI, Bots, computing and network. But to build this new IT platforms in end user industry, what would be the skills in demand for an IT manager?

Obviously the knack for Innovation, breaking barriers, bypassing bureacratic walls, asking difficult questions would top the list. Skills like people management, project management, vendor management would move to the 2nd bucket. The IT workforce would possibly try to justify the word “knowledge worker” to a greater extent.

Since this disruption would also cause a lot of change on how the teams work, do we also need to rebuild the EQ of the IT leaders? Much had been talked about these soft skills ealier, as job of IT manager required convincing large teams to excel in their work. But that would change soon.

The number of Individual contributors at higher end of the IT management would increase, who can draw power not by the number of reportees or the amount in his budget sheet, but by the number of business/IT services he has replaced with Artificial Intelligence and bots.

Eventually this deluge of automation should lead to a better bottomline for the organization. The IT manager would need to pose difficuly questions to the business as the business models may come under scanner. IT manager would continue to be in the eye of the storm (the social/people factors) for automating stuff which were done by manual workforce earlier.

Is it something different from the past when Operation automation had moved pen-and-paper model of doing business to data-capture-at-source via Mobile devices? Yes it is, just by the scale of it.

The opportunities of automation are going to be immense. The organizations would love to get the maximum benefits out of this to improve bottomline as well as topline.

As a last word, the IT manager should also better watch out. Once the manual repititive jobs are done away with via Automation, the next step might be to replace the very managers via bots and AI. And as Dilbert reminds, unless you are doing really complicated stuff, it would be easy to replace most of the IT workers in the coming days as well. Get ready for the times of jobless growth.

Have something to add or want to connect for more offline discussion? Connect me at Twitter /Linkedin or email me at csubhamoy@gmail.com.

Subhamoy Chakraborti, VP-IT, Magma Fincorp Limited

Enterprise Cloud implementation on Public Cloud IaaS - 5 steps you must follow

On the journey towards Enterprise cloud implementation, the most critical part for the IT team comes just after the Cost-benefit analysis has been approved by the senior management and the budget approval has also arrived. The CIO/CTO & the IT team needs to meticulously architect the cloud solution at this juncture to meet the performance as well as the cost targets to reap maximum benefits from this exciting journey.

It’s an understatement now-a-days to say that Cloud is here to stay. In fact it has permeated in our daily life already. You have already started experiencing it in all likelihood - in your daily chores, for various utilities, games & apps. 

• For example, if you use Dropbox for maintaining your digital assets across multiple devices, you are using the service of one of the Gartner leader quadrant cloud Infrastructure service provider. 
• On the other hand, if you are using Apple iTunes, you are using the service of the other leader quadrant cloud service provider. And these are not exceptions. Apart from these consumer apps and platforms, you would find enough instances of organizations, that too from your domain, who has moved their applications to cloud infrastructure. 

With all these data and case studies in your armor, selling the idea of cloud to your senior management has become lot easier, if not cakewalk. Also there is a proven method of doing the cost-benefit analysis for choosing the cloud vs. on-premise options. That should guide you to choose the right option and present the benefits to the senior management.

However the CIO/CTO and the IT team faces a bigger challenge as soon as they get the go-ahead. It’s time to architect and deliver the cloud solution! Since this is a new technology, the IT team tends to learn the tricks of the implementation the hard way, and faces various hurdles overcoming each of them as it comes. 

Based on the experience of implementing Cloud Infrastructure in a Financial organization in India, we would share few tips to you in this article. This might help you in the process and hope would make the journey much easier for your organization. 

The basic assumptions are: 

a. You have already got the buy-in from your management towards cloud journey. 

b. You have done your maths on arriving at a CBA towards Cloud.

And here goes the 5 Steps:

Step 1) The first step in the cloud implementation journey is to decide whether you are going to have non-production environments or production environments on cloud infrastructure. This is a key decision factor in defining the cloud strategy for your organization. This is also going to define your security strategy, redundancy, and overall cloud architecture. Put most of your time into this aspect, before you move into the next step.

Step 2) The next important choice to make is between pushing new applications vs. the existing legacy applications. If you are moving your new applications to cloud, you should talk to your application vendor to factor that in their architecture. The horizontal scalability is a must for this. If you are planning to move your existing applications, the complexity comes out to be of different order.

Step 3) Choosing Cloud instances is often tricky. You need to choose them wisely. If your cloud infrastructure service provider shares instances with pre-configured specs only, you won’t be able to create an instance of any combination of Core and RAM specification. In such situations, generally you are tempted to choose the safest option by going for the peak size requirement. But here you need to be a bit more innovative, and take the best of cloud. Choosing the right instance is critical for meeting the performance norms as well as keeping the cost in control.

Step 4) Once you have chosen the right instances, it’s time to consult your IT Security team. You need to be very sure about the security policies to be deployed in your cloud infrastructure. Please ensure that you are getting your cloud instances reviewed via CISO to avoid any untoward experience.

Step 5) Last but not the least, immediately train your system administrators on the chosen cloud platform. The criticality of the system administrators continue even after you have moved to Cloud, as they need to manage and monitor the instances and also need to jump into action whenever there is any emergency.

With a little more time in planning the Cloud implementation than you had initially thought of, the journey to Cloud can made a successful one in your first attempt. Go and achieve it!

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Thank you for checking this article. I contribute regularly on Technology & Management related stuff. Apart from this blog, you can follow me at 
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About me: I have been working in the areas of IT strategy & usage of Digital technology to deliver business growth. My areas of interest include Enterprise Mobility, Cloud Solution Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Social Media and Big Data. I am an alumni of Indian Statistical Institute (MTech Computer Science) and also attended Harvard Business School Executive Education on Innovation and Driving Growth.