National Seminar 2020
Owing to the pandemic, the 21st edition of the National Seminar was hosted online this year. The host introduced the audience to the theme of the seminar i.e. ‘Embracing Agile Practices to Mould Management Practices in the Virtual World’. He touched upon the burning topic of survival of the organizations by embracing agile practices.
The session started with the Director Dr. Dhanya Pramod Ma’am sharing her thoughts on the idea of the National Seminar and its theme. She added that every year the Seminar is conducted with an aim to address the current trends in the industry. Since the businesses are going online, owing to Covid-19, they have adopted agile practices to stay in the market.
The first speaker of the seminar was Mr.Erdal Ozkaya who is a speaker, an author, a lecturer, and a technical expert. As we all know, the pandemic has not stopped the hackers and there are attacks happening. He imparted some knowledge regarding how to keep ourselves abreast of methods and how to be assured of our safety. He went on to Big Data and discussed three things that are intertwined i.e.1. How one started the journey 2. The current state and 3. The technology being used. Hence big data is needed to leverage insider security. With the ever-increasing data, now in petabytes, the main concern is to secure them. Better governance and controls are needed to mitigate and detect unforeseen attacks. He concluded by encouraging the students to be aware of the past and with the amalgamation of knowledge and current technology, there can be a better future for all.
The next speaker was Ms. Kamolika Peres who serves as director of sales for Google cloud India and also a great orator. She comes with 20 years of experience in consulting, business and technology, transformation enterprise suite. She spoke about digital transformation and companies that morphed in accordance with the new norms stood upright during pressing times. With the change in customer’s behavior the business processes were re-engineered and how business models changed. She mentioned that Google is not only confined to an infrastructure storage network but also includes collaboration with data and analytics, machine learning, AI, application development. If the company is monolithic which is not a good indication given that digital transformation requires lots of investments. She spoke about core innovative principles that were about how one should be passionate about the missions and doing the impossible by taking risks. She said about how AI is one of the most important facets of Google and gave a few examples on the same like Google Translate and the whole ability to take pictures and do a translation of the picture that is rendered.
The final speaker was Mr. Surya R who works as a director of supply chain management at Myntra. He mentioned the uncertainty the Covid-19 has brought with itself and how e-commerce companies go through to mitigate the hurdles and successfully deliver the package. Every other physical contact has been stalled apart from the employees working in the warehouses keeping safety at the highest level of priority which resulted in high maintenance costs so as to maintain and sustain the customer’s trust. He mentioned the ever-increasing and ever-changing need for technology and its impact which it brings along with it. He explained the agility concept with a few examples like Netflix and Tesla. Agility being second nature is helping organizations evolve and scale as a network by incorporating AI and ML. He said about how to embrace change and not be skeptical about it. Agility is not an option as status-quo needs to be questioned. Lastly, he urged us to learn different things and asked us not to be afraid of failure.
The session ended on a positive note. A vote of thank you was delivered by the host and the event was a big success and insightful. It taught us the importance of agility and we should adapt to change.