Software People Stories

In this conversation, Mani Ratnam, Senior Vice President at Strategic Education Inc shares his  thoughts and experiences, with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, related to: The transition from being a techie to someone visualizing and creating a larger impact How wanting to take ownership of the impact helped in this transition over time Getting guidance from many experienced mentors and learning by doing / failing Using a data driven experimentation approach, based on some formal models such as lean thinking, six sigma etc Understanding the user personas and their challenges when designing the key value propositions for the company Why data alone is not sufficient to make decisions His views on delivering knowledge not just in tie, but also just enough as needed at that moment The significance of a culture of innovation  Encouraging teams to take risks How to help new team members think team results above individual contributions His thoughts on work life balance Getting teams aligned to a larger goal His perspective on the future of IT as a career option, and his own learning in this career Mani Ratnam is a Senior executive with deep business and technology experience leading Strategic Business Transformation initiatives and Operations. His Specialties include: Strategic Planning, Information Technology, Product Development, Big Data, Analytics, Customer Experience, Operations, CRM (SalesForce). He can be reached at: www.linkedin.com/in/mani-ratnam-6812044  (https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.linkedin.com_in_mani-2Dratnam-2D6812044&d=DwMFAg&c=bzqg8wBG-gmCffjjhiRy9RUbPhJ6AtQiizA-WVtoiSk&r=sXnBnMpFCw7fwo0iMNgQ1knmlCaviVvmE-p5pRkTjh0&m=dNRh88K60K8BHElfY2Tal5hihHqfrvYAS79U2VkyJy0&s=oydhc4HDRCi4YTyWTzqJ7YcGo2jc5bCFSr52PTSHiaM&e=) mani.ratnam@strategiced.com

In this conversation Ved Prakash, Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) at Trianz, shares his perspectives and experiences with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting, about: His education in engineering and management His experience as a techie Being the first person in the company to lead an industry vertical How he was asked to make knowledge management more effective in wipro;  what, he thought would be a 2 year stint, became the turning point in his career The opportunities he saw in making larger impact and hence taking up new roles in other organizations Bridging an engineering mindset that may need clear specifications to the KM domain, where many things could be exploratory How his doing an MBA helped him become a knowledge oriented person The key role for a knowledge officer What is the role of knowledge management in the context of startups and beyond organizational boundaries Adopting some simple practices, such as scrum and using simple techniques to manage collective knowledge in startups  His thoughts on whether AI and ML will replace knowledge management professionals The traits needed to be a successful KM professional and the opportunities as a career in KM Ved Prakash is a well-recognized senior industry professional with a global experience of 28 years in a variety of leadership roles with strategic, business and operational responsibilities. He is currently Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) at Trianz, a Silicon Valley based Management Consulting firm helping Fortune 1000 organizations transition to a digital enterprise. He is also an independent KM Strategy Consultant to other organizations, guiding them on their knowledge transformation journeys. Prior to this, he spearheaded Knowledge Management at Montreal-headquartered CGI Inc. He led a large business transformation program across the organization there and was also a member of the Global Application Services Council at CGI. Ved was with Wipro Technologies for two decades where he was the CKO in his last role. Under his leadership, Wipro was the proud recipient of Global, Asian and Indian MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise) Awards and was also granted a US patent on KM. Amongst other leadership roles at Wipro, he led the Healthcare and Life Sciences vertical with P&L responsibilities, and incubated and grew the Energy and Utilities business as the Practice Head. Ved has been an invited speaker in many national and international forums. He has been a driving force over the past many years in the conduct of CII Knowledge Summit, the annual flagship event on KM. He has consulted organizations across the world and across industries on their KM strategies. Ved is on the India Jury of Global MIKE (Most Innovative Knowledge Enterprise) Awards. He has been a member of several industry bodies including KM Global Network, KM Advisory Committee at National e-Governance Division of central Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, CII National Committee on KM and Business Transformation, and Bureau of Indian Standards National Committee for KM Standards. He holds an MBA from Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and a B.Tech in Computer Engineering where he was a Gold Medalist.

In this episode, Balakrishnan Sreenivasan - a Distinguished Engineer with IBM shares his perspectives with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting on His experience that led to becoming a distinguished engineer How one has to internalize and abstract models [such as TOGAF] to solve large enterprise problems Starting with documenting an existing architecture.. How hard could that be - until you realize the possible ways in which it can be used On whether he has seen Conways law in practice How abstracting shared or common services helps simplify organizational design as well How he got to thinking of problems from an organization or business point of view, rather than technology alone How to look at microservices to enable robust architectures The dimensions an enterprise architect should know, when considering cloud based solutions How an architect balances the anticipation of future technology and the need to implement something today by the dev teams Benefits of embedding Site Reliability Engineers into dev squads An experience from a delivery transformation exercise to reduce the average release cycle from 3 months to 3 weeks Implications of mixing and matching homegrown and open source components in enterprise solutions Shifts in business models with the acceptance of ‘... as a service’ concepts The blurring lines across industries Considerations for building ecosystem based solutions His tip for future proofing one’s career in IT Balakrishnan Sreenivasan is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Officer in IBM's Global Business Services. He is a Subject Matter Expert in Cloud Transformation, Application Modernization, DevOps, Application Operations on cloud, Offering development & enterprise architecture He is a Technical Advisor, who guides senior client executives on IT strategy and enterprise architecture including Cloud strategy across varied industries. Capability in offering Client Services for Cloud Application Services in IBM's Global Business Services (GBS); As a Thought Leader, he bridges the gap between IT and Business to improve business flexibility and agility using approaches such as BizDevOps, Cloud, Microservices & API economy. Responsible for cloud computing, DevOps Transformation and Hybrid Cloud / Multi-Cloud Architecture. Bala is recognized as a Cloud Solutions Evangelist for Cloud adoption including DevOps transformation with excellence in ensuring continuous improvement of Cloud offerings and building Cloud-scale data services.

Tune into this episode, a deep exploratory conversation between Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting and Rinka Singh, Co-Founder, AccelerateFire shares his stories of  Being a serial start-up-person Doing things outside of the day job, including starting the Software Process Improvement Network (BSPIN), Bangalore How he got interested in quality, process etc The experience of getting representatives from many organizations to come together and share data Some of the driving thoughts behind the open source movement, and Linux, in particular Can the NIH syndrome be broken to help with opensource adoption? How an external [customer] trigger pushes internal adoption What would be one overarching reason to use open source About the value proposition of superior performance for the lucene search engine, from his startup How github is helping small companies and developers Need for and possible implications of creating new ways of developing software Zero cost reviews in open source Trends influencing the software development process, including the limitations of hardware Challenges in computing posed by large volumes of data - and dark data The need to look beyond the von Neumann model of computing His career advice to those aspiring for careers in IT or are looking at the next stage of growth Rinka has conceived and is working on a Technology Startupcurrently early stage.  He has previously defined and implemented product road-maps, managed multi-million $ contracts out of India and has participated in Industry Forums his company representative.  His technology and domain experience is in the systems software and protocols which covers various processors (ARM, ATmega, x86, VIA, Alpha, Sparc, boards from Motorola, Arduino & TI), various OSs (VxWorks, pSOS & various flavors of Unices) and both Datacom (TCP/IP & IPv6 stacks, WAN & Routing protocols) and Telecom (ATM, ISDN, etc). His specializations include architecting, product and technical management organization management, delivery and people management .

In this conversation between Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting & Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSpirit Foundation, Sharad shares several off the beaten track perspectives on His multi-threaded career navigated via multiple s-curves How to create innovative software products, a dual immersion necessity If you read it in the news, dont follow it! Solving problems through different layers of work happening in different realms - the apple and android battery case. Understanding your personality archetype and going from good to great. Developing a contrarian mindset Sharad's has three decades of experience in the Internet, Enterprise Software, and Digital Infrastructure markets and is a prominent voice in India's technology ecosystem. Sharad is a passionate evangelist of the software product ecosystem in India. He co-founded iSPIRT Foundation, a non-profit technology think tank devoted to making India a product nation. Earlier, he Chaired NASSCOM Product Forum in its formative years and was a member of the NASSCOM Executive Council from 2009-13. Sharad co-founded Teltier Technologies Inc., and is an active technology angel investor with over two dozen investments. He was also instrumental in the success of India's first IP focussed fund, India Innovation Fund. Sharad has held several senior R&D executive positions with leading technology companies, including Yahoo, VERITAS Software, Symantec, Lucent Technologies, and AT&T. Zinnov gave him the R&D Visionary Award in 2008 for his work on creating a strong MNC R&D footprint in India. Sharad is a member of SEBI's Financial and Regulatory Technology Committee. He has also served on RBI's UK Sinha MSME Committee and National Digital Payments Committee. Sharad got interested in kernel software development while doing his Electrical Engineering at Delhi College of Engineering. He started India's first Student Minicomputer Club in 1984 as served as the Chairperson of the IEEE Student Chapter.

Tune into the conversation between Pallavi Srinivasa, Director of Product Management at Cisco and Chitra Gurjar from PM Power Consulting where Pallavi shares her basket of a variety of experiences and thoughts around  - Magic happening via bits n bytes - Connectedness of people, information & energy - Customer experience, product thinking and development, and the role of human emotions in developing solutions - Cost of impatience in using technology and AI v/s slow growth in a holistic manner - Getting customers to open up about their real problems & placing the product in their thinking - What customer connect means despite being a big brand like Cisco, tips for product managers - How an organization rallies behind a customer, across engineering, sales, marketing, product mgmt - Her journey into product management, from a human factors engineering person and a technical marketing engineer - A message for people considering product management as a career option - Her belief in boundless potential to help humanity through technology Pallavi Srinivasa is an industry veteran with over 18 years at Cisco in various leadership roles in areas of product management, technical marketing and sales. During the course of her career at Cisco, Pallavi has led product management and technical marketing teams in the areas of enterprise networking and analytics applications. Pallavi has also spent a significant amount of time focused on driving business growth in India in the enterprise and data center portfolio.   Most recently, Pallavi has been leading Enterprise Switching Portfolio   Outside of Cisco responsibilities, Pallavi is also very active in mentoring STEM programs, driving diversity of leadership in technology companies.

We welcome our listeners back to the Software People Stories with our first podcast for 2020. Gayathri and Chitra, colleagues at PM Power consulting thoroughly enjoyed this un-crafted conversation and were pleasantly surprised at what unfurled. Tune into their conversation where Chitra shares her experiences on - How a career journey is often not on a ladder but looking at it as an exploration Mindswitch happened when she moved from development to testing  Looking at software from customer empathy as a system tester Moving from an individual contributor to a manager  Tips on interviewing  Entrepreneurship through co-creation How there needs to continuous learning and curiosity Accomplish over something with power of sleeping over something and connect the dots Situation on STEM in India Wonder of networks with 2009 with 14 people started and moving to large movement of volunteers - How the conference gave a voice for women in various organizations and helped to create tech communities for women in many ways

Its been a great year with 54 episodes. Plenty of stories from around the world through the voices of people sharing their experiences, insights, lessons, advice, perspectives and so much more. We take this opportunity to thank our listeners and our guests for supporting the Software People Stories and wish you all a very happy new year. We are taking a short break and will be back with people stories and much more. Stay tuned! Cheers, Sivaguru, Chitra and Gayathri PM Power Consulting.

This conversation highlights stories and experiences of Jayesh Chakravarthi, Co-Founder and CEO of Recast technologies with Sivaguru from PM power consulting  on Selling technology, solutions & software Envisioning solutions to solve Bengaluru traffic problems Entrepreneurial experiences and product validation 3 good tips for entrepreneurs on how to take an idea to a feasible business The importance of having multiple founders; including thought & experience diversity and how to handling change management Selling v/s developing technology; converting desires into products;  His ideal of a good architect What changed in his leadership style through his years of experience Competency, communication & culture Leadership principles & experiences from his own leadership journey Why he would chose to be in IT, if his career were to start today and how he would envision his evolution. Jayesh Chakravarthi has over three decades of experience in the technology and the financial services industries. He has held leadership positions in Business Developmemt, Sales & Marketing, Brand Management, Advertising, Strategic Planning and Program Managemenet, spanning Indian companies as well as multinationals. Over the last ten years, Jayesh was the country head for Fidelity Investment’s offshore technology services; prior to which he was vice president at MindTree Consulting. Jayesh was Director for channel distribution at Sun Microsystems, India Operations. He started his career at Wipro in brand management.  Jayesh has been associated with CII, NASCOM & BCIC. His other interests include writing, teaching and mentoring. He can be reached via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayesh-chakravarthi-a167191/)

Listen to Jeetu Narayan, Business Executive, Entrepreneur and Technology specialist share insights with Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting on a wide array of topics that include - Being a second generation IT professional in his family Considering himself to be a product technologist Getting hooked on to computers through games Addictive products and the attention economy Building things useful for your customers Different learnings from startup, mid market companies The importance of EQ Waterfall, agile and natural approaches to software development How nature’s changes are about the ecosystem His perspectives on the impact and trend of where AI is headed The considerations for distributing work in a globally spread team Going beyond outside-in metrics only How he went about managing stress at work Being considered as a rainbow character and a data person : using the Strengths Deployment Inventory His way to handle the commute stress.. In bangalore traffic! A lesson he learnt from his manager about working long hours How he is trying to influence the curriculum for technology related subjects in educational institutions to also have softer aspects such as Emotional Intelligence And whether there would be a third generation IT person in his family! Jeetu Narayan is an experienced technology veteran as a Business Executive, Entrepreneur and Technology Specialist having invested over 2 decades in product ventures and, having managed initiatives across Business Intelligence & Analytics, Hybrid Cloud, Mobile solutions and SCM domains. Jeetu’s expertise lies in blending the best practices from his experience spanning across Fortune 10 companies through to medium and entrepreneurial ventures. He holds a Post-graduation in business management and a Master's degree in software systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeetunarayan/