HOW TO WORK FROM HOME CALL ETIQUETTE DON’T TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE

FORGET
HOME OFFICE Dress up in a way that puts you
in work mood
In video meetings, raise hand when
you want to speak TO Get Uniting storytellers from Nagpur to SFO
T
Find a space at home which is quiet sunlight, oday, a company in Nag- and how to map their writ-
and comfortable to work Plan your work day Stay on mute if you expect enough
background disturbance pur can learn the same ings across various social
Get an ergonomic chair Have a routine, don’t work drinking technologies adopted by media handles; understand-
(some companies permitting continuously for long hours Have a signal for the water their counterparts in Silicon ing how to tell them your
employees to use allowance Check VPN connectivity child when you are on a Valley, learn the same codes business story.
to buy such chairs) to have a seamless call and don’t want them and even share the best These are all real chal-
ongoing connection to talk to you practices, from hiring better lenges faced by business
Ensure good Stay
broadband connection, Talk to your team Everyone in a video call to building better business- organisations. I see big
connected,
buy dongle and UPS if regularly to should be accommodating if Exercise es. But when it comes to data and AI playing a
children/pets walk into
so you don’t
necessary (companies work in sharing their stories to huge role in helping
the video feel lonely
reimburse) collaboration the world, the world is Indian businesses
Source: Based on what Walmart, Dell, Microsoft, SAP, Mindtree are doing
extremely broken. The to think of their

100% WFH: Techies & companies

problems are the same, story, discover the
be it in Nagpur or San relevant global
Francisco. The com- shapers in New
mon issues they face York and reach out
are: Identifying the right to them – while sit-

are taking to it like fish to water

thought leader; ting remotely
figuring out in their
how to reach offices in
out to them Nagpur

Anshul Sushil | CO- FOUNDER & CEO, WIZIKEY

SAP’s Sengupta notes that the
They had most WFH IS NOT ALIEN TO US company has so many centres that
distributed working is inherent to
ingredients for en Michael Dell has been talking of
Connected Workplace for a long
them. “Even a lot of customer sup-
port is online,” he says. So 100%
masse work-from- time. The culture of working from
anywhere has been there in Dell for
WFH was just an extension of a

home – laptops,
well-established culture.
some ten years now. We encourage it. Everyone’s talking and collaborating
I live in Pune but also manage
cloud, remote Bengaluru. I wasn’t asked to move
on Teams and Zoom. Those are two
words on practically everyone’s lip
work culture Vinita Gera | GM, INDIA-COE, DELL
today. A survey last month of tech
centres by consultancy Zinnov
TECHNOLOGIES
Sujit.John@timesgroup.com found that 35% use Skype/Teams,

T
Contrary to popular belief that 20% Zoom, 15% Webex, 22% a mix
hat was not the heading remote workers work less due to of solutions, and 8% use
we thought we would be freedom from oversight and BlueJeans, Slack, etc.
giving when we started Gera said they use Microsoft’s
monitoring, current stats show a We have become an essential service
work on this story. But as Teams for chats and sharing pic-
significant increase in productivity for Walmart globally and the cross-
we started talking, we re- tures, and Zoom for calls and video
alised how much the tech world is from working remotely given the functional teams here help in that. We’ve meetings. People love Zoom partly

Your kids might

made for work-from-anywhere. level of distraction in a personal done a lot of software tweaks to deal with because they can view scores of peo-
Work-from-home (WFH) is just a space is relatively less the new environment. Customers are very ple at the same time. Vasudev said
subset of that. Sarv Sarvanan | VP & BUSINESS happy. And all the work is happening one of the Walmart teams had a
We spoke at length to five of the LEADER, MICROSOFT from home lunch meeting over Zoom video, an-

enjoy these free

leading technology/IT companies
and centres in India, each with sev-
eral thousands of employees in the
country. There was so much in com-
We are doing a lot to keep
employees engaged. Single people
can feel anxious alone at home. We
other had a family event. But after
Hari Vasudev | COUNTRY HEAD AND SVP, the recent security controversy
WALMART LABS INDIA around Zoom, we can see some get-
ting a little reluctant to talk of Zoom.
We want to honour the

coding apps
mon in what they said. are doing remote counselling. We are Microsoft’s Saravanan not sur-
They all foresaw the possibility commitments we have made (on
encouraging employees to share prisingly said, “Teams is what we
of WFH and prepared for it. That project timelines). So we are tracking live and die by.” They use White-
family pics. On Fridays, we have a those. The number of appreciations from
was because they all operate board on Teams to illustrate points,
Virtual Happy Hour, with families and customers in the last 2-3 weeks is
globally, and so got information on and Channels in Teams to share
pets joining unprecedented. There have been no major
responses to the pandemic early – notes. For SAP and Mindtree, Teams Habeeba.Salim@timesgroup.com
from countries that were impacted Deb Deep Sengupta | concerns around productivity is the primary collaboration tool. FREE RESOURCES FOR KIDS

before India was. “From March 9,
we had started telling employees
you can work from home. By the
second week, we said please work
from home. So by the time of the
lockdown, most were already
working from home,” says Vinita
Gera, GM of the India centre of
excellence (CoE) at Dell
Technologies. It was a similar
timeline at SAP.
Mindtree had set up a crisis
management team, and a war
room by the end of February. The
team mapped out multiple sce-
narios, and contingency plans for
each. “By March 17, less than 100
people were in of fice,” says
Suresh H P, head of digital deliv-
Meet India’s first
MD, SAP INDIA
ery at Mindtree.
All or almost all employees
work on laptops. So there was
none of the burden of shifting
large numbers of desktops
home. Deb Deep Sengupta, MD
of SAP India, says SAP began
the move to laptops and iPads
more than a decade ago.
If something goes wrong with
the laptop, on most occasions,
these can be fixed remotely. But
where that can’t be done, compa-
nies have standby laptops that
can be delivered to homes using
state passes.
Mindtree, which works for a
Suresh H P | HEAD, DIGITAL DELIVERY, MINDTREE
variety of customers, already had
a good number of customer per-
missions for remote working.
Where it did not, the permissions
were sought, and received quickly.
Mindtree also had some 100 desk-
tops that some customers had
mandated. Permissions to shift
these home took a little more time.
Most of the important applications
and data are on the cloud. “So
even if working remotely, it
looks like you are working in
office,” says Suresh.
Crucially, everyone has a remote/
distributed work culture already.
As Sarv Sarvanan, VP & business
IMAGINATE: REMOVING BOREDOM FROM ONLINE CLASSES
leader for Microsoft’s modern work-
place solutions and services (respon-
sible for products like Teams and
Office 365), says, the India business
for tech companies tends to be all
about remote. “We have globally
spread out teams. I have teams in
India, I have a GM (general man-
ager) in Redmond, a GM in EMEA,
in APJ. To solve customer problems
we come together,” he says.
Hari Vasudev, country head
and SVP of Walmart Labs in Ben-
galuru, says their teams are very
used to working from home, and
with stakeholders and teams in
the US and elsewhere.
W
Email seems to be on the decline. ould you like to get your Code.org
Home broadband connections little one to start learn-
are pretty good. But there are times A non-profit website
ing coding during this
to encourage people,
when they are an issue, particularly lockdown? Well, there are a few
particularly school students,
for those in shared/PG accommoda- tried and tested free apps and
tions. The problem is being ad- to learn computer science
websites you can try out.
dressed partially through dongles Some educators say Code. Scratch
and mobile hotspots. While video is org, an open source website, is A block-
everyone’s choice of communica- the right place to start. “They based visual
tion, people switch to audio when have a mix of online, live, un- programming
the connection is poor. plugged activities you can do at language and
home,” says Shoaib Dhar, a website targeted
After decades of globalisation, Pune-based mechanical engi- primarily at children
countries are beginning to partially neer who teaches coding and
close their borders. Some expect this Lightbot
robotics to government school-
pandemic to accelerate this trend. children. There’s only one chal- An educational video game
But this pandemic is also demon- lenge. “When a grade 6 student for learning software
strating that technology will keep us in the US or UK refers to the programming concepts.
close, even if we are physically apart. grade 6 content in these web- Also available as an online
sites, it would make sense to Flash game
them. In the India context, kids Grasshopper
may find it different or diffi- Get familiar with coding
cult. But they can always start basics like functions, strings,
THE IMAGINATE TEAM with simpler stuff,” he says. variables, loops with a
Bharath Divyang, founder JavaScript curriculum. This

woman IBM Fellow IGNITE YOUR CAREER

of ZugZwang academy, a Ben-
Arpita.Misra@timesgroup.com galuru-based coding and robot-
ETHICS IN AI IMPORTANT ics academy, however says
Google product is for middle
school and up
few households do that early
on. The good age in India to
start is around 10, when the

T he first time she saw a com-

puter was when she peeked
into her college lab soon after
joining engineering in the early 90s.
It was the AC room that impressed
her the most.
At the time, computer science
was a subject not many had heard
about in Bareilly, the small town in
UP where she grew up. But she was
mesmerised by it.
Shalini Kapoor, who recently
joined IBM’s hallowed list of Fel-
lows, a seat reserved for the compa-
ny’s top scientists, engineers and
programmers, had dared to dream
different. “My mother oriented my
thoughts. She was very clear that I
had to be independent and not just
follow the herd,” says Shalini. She
took up maths because she wanted
to shatter myths like ‘women can be
doctors but not engineers’.
Shalini is the first woman Fellow ture and Cognizant.
from IBM India. In her role as Fel-
low - artificial intelligence, Shalini’s
key focus is to spearhead infusion
of AI across IBM’s cognitive appli-
cations business unit. “This also
INSPIRATION
includes realignment of skills and
culture to empower innovation and
enable rapid uptake of AI across all
of IBM’s offerings while adopting
Watson technologies,” explains Sha-
Today, ethics in AI is
extremely important.
Remove bias in data and make your
models ethically right to build trust
Code.org can be a little over-
whelming for children, espe-
cially if they are going there
for the first time. “It is very
child’s brain has that plasticity,
in terms of learning something
new,” says Dhar. “By age 15 and
16, children develop a lot of re-
into the system rich in content, so someone inforced notions. For example,
needs to be there to facilitate girl students in higher grades
Shalini Kapoor | IBM FELLOW -
learning. Otherwise, the trial show a lot of inhibition to-
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
and er ror is a hard wards learning technolo-
Since 1963, when the Fellow role thing for the children to gy,” he adds.
was instituted by IBM, there have do by themselves. Par- If you catch your-
been a total of only 317 Fellows. Of ents can always play the self asking the ques-
these, only two emerged from IBM facilitator’s role though,” tion, why should every-
India – Ram Viswanathan in 2019, he says. one make an effort to
Hemanth Kumar While Lightbot, de- understand coding or com-
and Shalini Kapoor in 2020
Satyanarayana’s signed like a game, helps kids puter science, hear what
clients,” says Shalini. Imaginate is an HOW THE PRODUCT WORKS develop problem solving skills Brenda Darden Wilkerson,
She is the brain behind Watson extended reality by just using blocks, Google’s CEO of AnitaB.org, a platform
IoT and AI Lab at IBM India Soft- company with virtual Using a PC or Mac, a With virtual reality and Grasshopper takes learning to for women in technology, told
ware Labs, and holds 12 patents. classrooms that allow student or an engineer can augmented reality devices, the next level. Simple JavaScprit TOI last November: “Not every-
She has helped in seeding and scal- immersive work-from- join gamified virtual the experience gets far lessons interspersed with prac- body is going to be a mathema-
ing technical missions for global home or learn-from- classrooms to interact more realistic for all the tice sessions will only have your tician, but we all learn maths.
systems integrators like TCS, home. It’s part of Nasscom’s DeepTech Club with his or her team participants in the child asking for more. If you Not everybody is going to be a
Wipro, Infosys, Capgemini, Accen- members along virtual decide to learn it along with your biologist...”
Satyanarayana is an alumnus of child, chances are that you’ll fin- Computational thinking is
IIT Madras and an MIT TR35 with an classroom
Shalini has constantly reinvent- instructor ish second. a set of problem-solving meth-
ed herself. From being a client- Innovator awardee This Five or six is usually the ods that involve expressing
facing person, she turned towards Imaginate, founded in 2011 and with offices in Each removes the ideal age to start coding. But a problems and their solutions
research. IBM Research was look- Hyderabad and San Jose, has been rated as a participant is boredom right start is important – the in ways that a computer could
ing for someone who could work on top innovator by Forrester, IDC and Gartner, and represented otherwise type of tool, and who is intro- also execute. “The value of un-
India-targeted innovations and she through their caused with ducing it can make the child derstanding computational
fit the bill.
has featured in Deloitte Fast 500 Asia 2020
photorealistic current 2D love it or hate it. “In the US and thinking and the tenacity and
She played a key role in building Shell, Rolls-Royce, Coca-Cola, ABB are avatar/character video-based UK, kids as young as five start grit that comes from having to
IBM’s IoT ecosystem.Shalini also among those who have used the product for and can enjoy a conferencing learning graphical program- iterate, to solve a problem, have
conceptualised and launched the purposes such as engineering design review, real-world like training solutions and brings ming or logic building. But in far reaching results,” said
company’s Tririga Building In- training and maintenance experience better human connect India, even in urban areas, very Wilkerson.
sights, a cloud-based offering that
connects building systems, sensors

Lines between engineering disciplines are blurring

lini, who has been with the organi-
and external products through a
zation for over 23 years. She thinks
web application.
getting a bird’s eye view of the
The tech pro has also been
cycle of incubation, creation
part of the firm’s Good
and adoption is extremely im-
Tech initiatives such as ing students to pick up relevant feel humanities and engineering or her strength and build on it.
portant to ensure a technol-
mentoring students at
Swati.Rathor@timesgroup.com
HEAR THE PROF programming skills as computing are like chalk and cheese. “The “I strongly war n students
ogy makes an impact.

G
Atal Tinkering Labs. one are the days of purists, more real-time computation pow- has entered every aspect of life. truth is, everything that you do is against the herd mentality. If
Shalini, 47, did BTech
She is helping design today’s engineering and sci- er. Now, with AI becoming more “Even school children are build- for humankind. So, without un- somebody likes analysis, ECE
in computer science and
the AI curriculum ence education have to be compute hungry as it has to pro- ing apps,” she notes. derstanding the multidimension- may be a good discipline to take
MBA in information sys-
framework for the CBSE interdisciplinary, says Prof Jay- cess a lot of data, people have to The professor feels today’s al nature of a problem – the socio- up. If somebody likes algorith-
tems. She started her
Board. “Technologies anthi Sivaswamy, dean of aca- design processors, chips, and youth are tuned into the times and logical, political or historical side mic thinking, then maybe CSE is
career with HCL, where
change fast and demics at IIIT Hyderabad. boards that meet this demand. As realise they must look beyond of it – how will you design an ef- a good choice. Once you identify
she worked for three
people feel out- She notes that with the phe- lines between hardware and soft- what is taught in their colleges. fective solution?” she asks. your strength and do what you
years, after which she
paced. There is nomenal rise in computing pow- ware blur, even the boundaries “A lot of learning is happening on Sivaswamy says it is also im- enjoy most, everything will fall
joined IBM Software
always a er, for instance, the long-drawn between disciplines are blur- online platforms like Coursera. portant for a student to find his into place,” she says.
Labs as a solution ar-
feeling:‘Oh, I boundaries between the disci- ring,” she says. There are also more and more
chitect. “That was a
d o n’ t know plines of computer science & Not just in engineering stud- students who are opting for in-
great turning point. I
enough’. engineering (CSE) and electron- ies, but in many areas of sci- ternships to get hands-on experi- Even as students hone technical skills, they
learnt a lot about the should also sharpen the right side of their
Transfor m ics & communication engineer- ences, such as drug discovery, ence,” she adds.
WebSphere technol- brain. Most engineering students feel humanities
yourself con- ing (ECE) are blurring. researchers are learning emerg- Engineering and science stu-
ogy and moved on to and engineering are like chalk and cheese. The
tinuously “Earlier there were CPUs ing technologies such as AI and dents should also sharpen the
service-oriented ar-
and get fu- (central processing units), then ML as they make the process of right side of their brain – the truth is, everything that you do is for humankind
chitecture, where I
ture-skills came GPUs (graphics processing discovering new drugs quicker creative side – and understand
worked extensively with Prof Jayanthi Sivaswamy |
ready,” advises units), because people who were and cheaper. their surroundings, the professor
banking and financial DEAN OF ACADEMICS, IIIT HYDERABAD
SHALINI KAPOOR Shalini. playing games required a lot Sivaswamy advises engineer- says. Most engineering students