Understanding the Why first with Nani Narayanan Srinivasan

In this episode, Shiv is in conversation with Nani Narayanan Srinivasan, who is the leader, Data Sciences at HomeUnion and has been in the IT industry for over four decades.

In this conversation, Nani talks about:

• Studying metallurgy and getting exposed to programming to design a blast furnace.
• Wanting to be in the systems software, Telecom and R&D side of computing.
• Opportunity to work on a project which was more of R&D, to implement a hot standby and takeover algorithm for mainframes.
• Realizing the need to understand a client’s business side, learning banking as a domain.
• How the thinking process is similar across solving business problems or systems software solutions.
• The need to understand why something needs to be done to be able to think strategically and understand the business.
• Handling time constraints for a consultant, who is expected to solve problems in a short time.
• Prioritize what is to be done, before jumping into how it is to be done.
• A ‘horror story’ when a design worked in principle and in the test environment, but resulted in a ‘race’ condition that led to the system being unusable in a production environment, and how this problem was resolved.
• Considerations of teams to be scalable: how this may be different based on the size of the company.
• How to bring efficiency with remote teams, or even when the team members are not of a homogeneous background.
• The need to understand various members, backgrounds and the business context to build high performance teams.
• The Prostyle model explained in the book Producing results with others.
• Career tips: for new entrants to the field : a combination of data science, bio-studies, to get into analytics or data science careers; or security for those looking at software application solutions.
• Data science as a technique will get embedded in everything we do, like internet has now become a basic component in most solutions.
• Learning Python, Kotlin, R etc for those interested in programming.
• For the mid-career professionals, understand the business side and go with the flow of business; in whatever you do, contribute to the revenue side of business, for an assured career.
• Many technologies are coming back - like old wine in new bottles.

Entrepreneur and seasoned technology professional with senior leadership roles in Financial Services (Real Estate Investment, Banking/ Mortgage), High Tech R&D, Telecommunications and SI Consulting. Led successful delivery of large and complex engagements in product development, data sciences and modeling, CRM, online banking, web applications, and mortgage servicing – many with original contributions to Intellectual Property. Guided teams implementing over 200+ industrial strength websites. A strategic thinker, designer and architect of key products with hands on practical delivery approach.

You can reach him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanin/