IBM sounds alarm over skills gap in India

Source: IBM. Cover for the Upskilling India report.

IBM has announced a study conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit to evaluate India's growing skills challenge and proposed recommendations to bridge the gap.

A majority of Indian executives surveyed in the study said that the quality and quantity of skills in the Indian workforce are at least comparable to those of other countries, and many reported them to be superior. However, only 40% indicated new employees in local labour markets have the requisite job skills.

The IBM study, Upskilling India, derives insights from a survey of academics, corporate-recruiters, and emerging education leaders in India. In addition, the study also analysed results of recent surveys of startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and corporate executives.

Key findings:

• Six in 10 (61%) of India's surveyed educators indicate that the higher education system is unable to respond to changing societal needs.
• Seven in 10 of India's venture capitalists indicated that startups cannot find employees with the right skills.
• Only 40% of Indian industry executives said new employees recruited in local labour markets have requisite skills.
• Nearly three quarters (73%) of India's education leaders surveyed say new technologies are disrupting higher education.

"Today's rapidly evolving economic environment makes developing new skills an imperative across job profiles and sectors. At IBM, we believe in providing an environment that fosters new learning and development experiences aided by the power of technology," said DP Singh, VP and Head - HR, IBM India/ South Asia. "We are working with government bodies, academia, corporates, startups and recruitment firms to equip India with a 'job-ready' workforce."

Between 2010 and 2030, India's working population is expected to expand from 750 million to almost 1 billion. Without adequate education and training, such population growth poses increased risk of the emergence of a growing class of the under or unemployed.

The study recommends:

Developing more practical, experience-based education - Rethink higher education curricula by identifying opportunities to infuse experience-based and real-world learning experiences and embracing new teaching technologies and techniques. Higher education institutions should build alliances with industry partners, share learnings and refine strategies.

Embracing technologies that improve educational access, experiences, and outcomes - Assess current capabilities and requirements, experiment with using new technologies and extend capabilities through ecosystem partners.

Build deeper relationships with ecosystem partners - Define and reach consensus with key partners around a common vision for the education ecosystem, with clearly defined commitments from all partners.

Interested?

Read the Upskilling India study

Download the IBM IBV app on an Android or iOS device

Charting the waters in a digital world

Strategists from IBM iX, the global consulting agency, recently convened more than 25 global executives from leading telcos and media companies to discuss challenges, opportunities and solutions for reinventing their businesses in a digital world.

Above all, the group recognised the need to create disruptive opportunities of their own before they themselves are disrupted. Companies are increasingly required to develop processes for identifying and understanding new digital paradigms that require attention, and the resources required to grow market share and profitability across their businesses. While the conversation focused on telco and media, IBM iX notes that the challenge of reinvention applies to all industries.

Said Brian Love, Associate Partner, IBM iX: "The discussions validated a rapidly changing world where customer expectations are on the rise, traditional customer relationships are changing hands and the demand for data drives massive investments in their networks."

Highlights included:

Digital orchestration – while the majority of companies have already developed new digital initiatives, few felt they were maximising their investments. Most have disparate efforts working under the CIO, chief marketing officer (CMO) and various business unit leaders, and find that these efforts often conflicted with one another. Telcos need to find ways to better orchestrate these efforts to remain aligned to one another, and to the overarching digital strategy. These efforts must be sponsored from top-down, starting with the CEO.

IT / business alignment – businesses face an ongoing divide between the technology organisation and the business. The success of new innovative, customer-centred business strategies require CIOs to provide the technology to execute – operating otherwise can cause innovations to stall. Business and IT planning must coordinate to ensure that investment in the platforms and employee tools support the customer experiences the businesses envisions.

Talent reinvention – participants indicated that only 30 to 50% of their workforce were prepared for their digital future. Telcos require significant retraining or refreshing of personnel capabilities, while tomorrow's employees will need new "digital savvy" that must be incorporated fluidly into team environments. In response, companies must be customer-focused, agile in approach and iterative in delivery. Difficult decisions may be required to position a team for future competition.

Innovation through new businesses – many of the executives report that the pressures of maintaining their business frequently impede their ability to invest in innovation. To handle current and future disruptions, companies must consider creating new entities and/or companies to drive their innovation agenda. Smaller, more nimble upstart companies are more likely to have the freedom to experiment, evaluate new partnerships and offer differentiated measures of success and incentives. Incumbent companies must identify unique, proprietary resources and expertise, and innovate with institutional competitive advantages.

Box Zones gives customers more flexibility in where they can store data

Enterprise content management platform Box has announced Box Zones to provide enterprises with the choice to store data regionally across Europe and Asia. By leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM Cloud, Box Zones will allow content in Box to be stored in Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Japan based on customer needs, the company said.

“Businesses today are more connected, collaborative and global thanks to the power of the cloud,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “Yet for many companies, local laws and regulations have forced them to make technology tradeoffs that limit their success and place a drag on employee productivity and collaboration. Box Zones will help power digital transformation for enterprise customers across Europe and Asia and accelerate our international presence.”

Today, more than 57,000 businesses, including 59% of the Fortune 500 rely on Box for secure content management and collaboration. Multinational businesses like Amadeus, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, General Electric, P&G and Schneider Electric have teams spanning the globe that require secure international collaboration to be successful.

"At Royal HaskoningDHV, we have more than 6,500 employees around the world and Box Zones addresses many of the major challenges that we face," said Roland Daane, Corporate Information Manager, Royal HaskoningDHV, which lists more than 20 offices in locations in Asia, Australia and the Middle East. "With this news, we're thrilled that Box is giving us even more choice around how we control and secure our content. This lets us focus on our goal of combining global expertise with local knowledge to deliver a multidisciplinary range of consultancy services in over 150 countries."

Box recently introduced services like Box KeySafe and Box Governance to provide customers with more flexible deployments. According to Box, Box Zones will support the needs of customers that require regional content storage without sacrificing any of Box’s modern collaboration features like document watermarking, granular permission controls, commenting and tasks, wide-ranging file preview, as well as integrations with business tools like Office 365 and Salesforce.

"Security is the top priority for AWS and our customers. With the recent launch of Box KeySafe running on AWS, Box offers companies of all sizes greater control over their business-critical, sensitive content, and furthers that mission with today's introduction of Box Zones,” said Terry Wise, Vice President of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Amazon Web Services. “We believe customers should have the freedom to choose where and how their data is stored. With Box Zones leveraging Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), customers can better meet the highest levels of security and regulatory compliance required in their respective geographies.”

"As enterprises turn to cloud as an innovation platform, data is at the centre," said Robert LeBlanc, SVP, IBM Cloud. "Box Zones on the IBM Cloud, with new technology from the recent acquisition of Cleversafe, will provide a platform for clients who prefer to store data in country for performance, security or other advantages. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Box and helping serve clients in Europe and Asia through our network of IBM Cloud Data Centers.”

Interested?

Box Zones is scheduled to be available next month for an additional fee and leverages Amazon S3 on AWS Regions in Germany, Ireland, Japan and Singapore. Box Zones is also scheduled to be available via IBM Cloud in Europe and Asia later this year for an additional fee.

India poised to dominate the 21st century

The 21st century could be the 'Indian century' as the country readies itself to emerge as a global leader, finds a new IBM study. More than 51% of executives stated that improved governance and the removal of excessive regulation will be a crucial driver of sustained economic growth. While building a strong social infrastructure was identified as the second most important contributor to economic productivity, over 40% of respondents identified good quality of physical infrastructure and availability of skilled resources as important drivers of growth.

The IBM study, Indian Century: Defining India's Place in a Rapidly Changing Global Economy, is based on interviews with 1,088 Indian executives across large enterprises, startups, academia and government to get their perspective on opportunities and roadblocks for the Indian economy.

India benefits from entrepreneurialism and diversity, currently ranking as the fourth-largest source of technology startups globally. By 2020*, India will constitute 30% of the world's workforce and by 2030*, the nation is projected to have the largest middle-class population in the world. A young population equipped with the right skills and growing middle-class will reinforce economic activity through increased consumption and investment.

"India is witnessing a transformation that promises to minimise constrains and support economic advancement. The buildout of social and digital infrastructure, powered by local innovations will help India become an integral part of the global ecosystem. The study rightly points out that India has immense potential to leapfrog traditional growth paradigms. If we are able to capitalise on the opportunities present in front of us, the next decade can definitely mark the beginning of the Indian Century," said Vanitha Narayanan, Managing Director, IBM India.

Executives rated ecosystems at the top of the list of factors to drive economic growth [55% of respondents], while 52% plan to start the ecosystem journey by collaborating with organisations from other industries. More than half of the executives surveyed pinpointed India's engagement in new global economic ecosystems as a means to sustainably place India in the ranks of the global economic elite.

Emphasising the importance of innovation, 57% of executives said it helps them stay ahead of customer expectations, while 41% used it to reduce cost. This is a clear indication that India is well positioned to transform its role in the world, moving from a provider of low cost technical services to a strategic leader with niche skills, IBM noted.

The study states that for India to realise its developmental goals startups, corporates, educators and government have to come together in pursuit of economic collaboration and advancement. India will need to look at itself as a knowledge economy - built on skills, innovation and technology, to indeed make the 21st century, an Indian century.

Interested?

Read the study

*http://usf.vc/updates/realizing-indias-demographic-dividend-gainfully-employing-a-billion-person-workforce/

Tech companies predominate in Asia Pacific LinkedIn members' mindshare

IBM, HP, Accenture, Google, Tata Consultancy Services. These are the top five companies that LinkedIn says its 50 million-plus members in Asia Pacific follow, and all of them are international tech companies.

Source: LinkedIn

The story differs in different countries. Google is in the top three in Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan, but not even in the list for India, Indonesia, Malaysia, or New Zealand. LinkedIn observes that many 'home-grown' companies or those with a significant market presence also have strong local followings. These include Petronas (Malaysia), Rio Tinto (Australia), Standard Chartered Bank (Singapore), Cathay Pacific (Hong Kong) and DeNA (Japan).

Thought leader and consumer darling Apple is, strangely enough, not in the regional top five list, nor Facebook, which you might reasonably believe to be one of the social platforms which many people use today. Apple does rank 4th in Singapore and Japan and 5th in Hong Kong, but that's it. Facebook does not even make it to the list by country.

LinkedIn does mention that it has helped clients across the region "reach out and engage with a broader audience". These clients include Standard Chartered Bank, AirAsia, SingPost, Lenovo, University of Queensland and Van Heusen. It's possible that such campaigns have helped put certain brands into LinkedIn members' mindshare beyond the ones most likely to be there - certainly Standard Chartered Bank is in the top five in Singapore and Hong Kong, and AirAsia in Malaysia. 

LinkedIn could well be a good channel for reaching out to targeted audience segments, especially if your brand makes it to the top in terms of companies that LinkedIn members want to follow. With 50 million-plus users already in the Asia Pacific region, reaching the people you want to will not take long.

Early adopters of cloud-based software are seeing clear payback: IBM

IBM has announced that nearly half of the businesses using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are achieving competitive advantage, rather than simply reducing costs, according to a recent global survey involving with more than 800 IT and business decision makers that was conducted by the IBM Center for Applied Insights.

The study confirms that SaaS is delivering on a wide array of benefits, on top of lowering total cost of ownership, and shows that organisations that strategically and collaboratively deploy SaaS are able to execute on programmes that drive business growth better than their peers who lag with SaaS deployments.  

Princess Cruise Lines, which organises cruises in Southeast Asia among other destinations, originally turned to SaaS to save money and benefit from increased efficiencies while gaining instant access to technology resources. 

Over time, the company realised that the IBM Connections social software platform, delivered as a service through the cloud, fostered a more team-oriented environment that encouraged more innovative thinking. Princess uses this as a competitive differentiator in the market to tout its superior customer service, the net effect of a socially advanced workforce.

Nearly one in five companies that responded to IBM’s survey has deployed SaaS broadly and is now gaining competitive advantage as a result. Specifically, compared to peers that are newer or less advanced with their SaaS adoption, these "Pacesetters" are:

·        79% more likely to have increased collaboration across their organisation and ecosystem through SaaS
·        More than twice as likely to have leveraged analytics across the organisation to turn big data into insights using SaaS
·        More than twice as likely to have increased innovation using SaaS
       
“It’s common knowledge that deploying SaaS broadly has economic advantages, but the truly innovative companies have recognised that SaaS delivers real competitive advantage to fuel top-line growth, as well,” said Craig Hayman, IBM General Manager, Industry Solutions and executive sponsor of the study. 

IBM unveiled the industry’s first cloud-suites for the entire c-suite in June 2013. A series of new SaaS applications were announced yesterday. 

Global spending on SaaS is expected to reach US$45.6B by 2017, according to industry estimates. SaaS is often used by line-of-business leaders who are looking to deploy technology to rapidly provide their teams with needed functionality, increase productivity and address new market opportunities. In fact, industry analysts estimate that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs, while Forrester reports that 65 percent of business leaders have plans to buy technology for their group without involving IT at all.

However, circumventing IT to deploy SaaS without provisioning and securing it first can have unintended consequences, and IBM’s study suggests that organisations in which IT and business leaders work together to select, secure and deploy SaaS applications are the ones who see the greatest payback.
Click here for more information, or to download the full report.  

*To gain a better understanding about how leaders are unlocking competitive advantage through SaaS, the IBM Center for Applied Insights** conducted a survey of 879 IT and line-of-business decision makers in six countries globally, including Brazil, China, India, South Africa, the UK and US. Twenty-two percent of respondents are C-level executives (10% C-level IT and 12% in other C-suite roles). They work in enterprises of varying sizes, 20% with 10,000 or more employees and, at the other end of the spectrum, 40% with fewer than 2,500 employees.

IBM Kenexa Talent Suite puts big data to work for HR

IBM today announced a new software-as-service (SaaS) that allows Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) and C-Suite executives to gain actionable insights into the data shared by their staff. 

With the cloud-based IBM Kenexa Talent Suite, organisations can streamline and add precision to hiring practices, increase workforce productivity and connect employees in ways that impact business results. 

The software allows HR resources to sift through large volumes of employee data – such as work experience, social engagement, skills development and individual interests – to identify the qualities that make top performers successful. They can then use the findings to locate individuals on social recruiting sites whose skills match these qualities. 

“We know people are the lifeblood of an organisation, and business success on today’s stage requires not just talent but social capabilities that can energise, empower and nurture each team member so they can reach their full potential,” said Craig Hayman, General Manager, Industry Cloud Solutions, IBM. “By combining social, behavioural science and analytics in the cloud, we give businesses a clear path to empower their most valued asset – employees.” 


According to an upcoming IBM C-Suite study that surveyed 342 CHROs representing 18 industries, many businesses are not taking full advantage of the insights delivered by workforce big data and analytics. The study found that just over half of organisations are using workforce analytics, with far fewer applying predictive analytics to optimise decision making and outcomes in areas such as sourcing and recruiting (7%), employee engagement and commitment (9%), talent development (10%) and retention (13%).

The CHRO study also found that human resources executives are in the early stages of applying social approaches within the organisation. Currently, 66% are regularly using social for their recruiting efforts, but only 31% are using it for knowledge sharing and 41% for learning.
 
AMC Entertainment, which is majority-owned by China's Dalian Wanda group, uses recruitment technologies from IBM to gain a deep understanding through data analytics of what it takes to succeed at the organisation. AMC then uses that knowledge to attract candidates who are more likely to succeed once they're hired.  

“Harnessing the power of data gives us a better picture of what top talent looks like in our industry. IBM’s talent management solutions allow us to use data in new ways so we can make better informed decisions that have a greater impact on our business,” said Heather Jacox, Director, Diversity, Recruitment & Development at AMC.

The IBM Kenexa Talent Suite includes the following:
·        Talent acquisition: Includes recruitment, skill and behavioural science-based assessments and onboarding. These functions provide a deep understanding of what the best talent looks like and then how to attract, hire and engage them. 

·        Talent optimisation: Includes performance management, succession planning and compensation planning to empower and get the most out of employees. 

·        Social networking:  Increases productivity with expertise identification and knowledge discovery – connecting employees and accelerating the time to productivity.