CIO & LEADER-Issue-06-September_iPad

Cover Story
Future workforce strategies, industries overall
Unconscious bias among managers
Lack of work-life balance
Lack of role models
Lack of qualified incoming talent
Women’s confidence, aspirations
Societal pressures
Unclear career paths
Lack of talent, leadership development for women
Don’t know
No barriers
Lack of parental leave
44%
44%
39%
36%
31%
23%
17%
15%
12%
10%
6%
Source: Future of Jobs Survey, World Economic Forum
What should we do?
“There's no perfect answer but it presents
a huge opportunity for training
companies to prepare the digital workforce
of the future,” said Prasad.
According to Alaganandan, there are
two important steps that come before
reskilling of the workforce. The first
step, she said, is to think through and
plan for the workforce for the future.
“Companies need to create a flexible
ecosystem that can provide easier
access to different skill sets and allows
different stakeholders to become part
of the value chain.”
The second step is to determine
the role of AI in order to address
which of the jobs in your organization
can be best done through cognitive
technologies.
The third and the final step, she said,
"is to identify and up-skill employees
in your workforce for better, more
important jobs in the organization."
India's most profitable PSU, Indian
Oil is on a 5 -year mission to automate
its fuel outlets in the country. Besides
automation, it also plans to turn 30
out of its 130-odd terminals into smart
ones in the next one year. The Corporation
has about 25,000 petrol pumps
of which 8,800 are already automated.
The company is using IoT to collect
a large amount of data from its plant
machinery and equipment. It is using
analytics to not only improve the efficiency
and performance of plants but
perform predictive maintenance to
determine the condition of in-service
“MANAGING ALL
THESE NEW-
AGE PLATFORMS
WILL REQUIRE
RESKILLING.”
Deepak Agarwal
Executive Director
- IT, Indian Oil
Corporation
equipments. It is also planning to
deploy a chatbot for its field force with
an aim to assess its usefulness in their
day-to-day working.
"Managing all these platforms
requires reskilling," said Deepak
Agarwal, Executive Director - IT,
Indian Oil Corporation.
“We have reskilled more than 90%
of our existing workforce,” he added.
The trick, Agarwal said, is to make
sure that our internal IT team is working
side by side with external stakeholders
in the project from planning
to execution for long-term IT projects;
for one-time deployments, we can
always hire external stakeholders,”
he added.
Chakravorty said that we must align
our training programs with the organization's
future strategy and answe
questions about finding the necessary
skills for it.
The other approach is to hire smart.
The PSU recruits once a year and the
process starts well in advance. Agarwal
said that they are hiring more
statisticians apart from computer sci-
September 2017 | CIO&LEADER
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