Exclusive Interaction - Lakshmi Mittra, VP & Head, Clover Academy

Lakshmi Mittra, VP & Head, Clover Academy has worked in the IT sector in the international markets before she began to train students for the corporate sector. Here, she discusses some aspects related to her work.

What are the requirements of becoming a good delivery and quality management professional in the IT business world?

Lakshmi - Delivery and quality manager is the professional who not only oversees the services provided to the customers but also ensures that it meets or exceeds customer’s expectation. They must maintain a great relationship with the customer, consult them on key industry trends, and enable them to embrace digital technologies for business acceleration. In addition to technical skills, soft skills such as communication and interpersonal skills, empathy, team management and customer servicing skills are essential for becoming a good delivery and quality manager.

How can the IT professionals and businesses resolve the challenges of evolving technology in today's challenging environment?

Lakshmi - Technology is an enabler of innovation. It enables to drive efficiencies and leads to competitive advantage, yet there are reservations when it comes to adoption of new-age technologies. Complexity of IT infrastructure is one such challenge.
For enterprises to promote the adoption of new-age technologies across business functions, they need to simplify their IT infrastructure and integrate new technology into current business processes. With strategising and planning, businesses can successfully overcome the challenges associated with integration of emerging technologies.
Further, the need for reskilling and upskilling of employees cannot be undermined when adopting a new technology. Every new technology adoption would require training and skilling initiatives so that employees become well-versed with it.

What is the graph of women reaching senior decision making positions in the IT industry today and how can this situation be improved?

Lakshmi - Over the years, the percentage of women entering the IT workforce has improved tremendously. However, only a handful of women make it to the senior management positions. Being an innovative and dynamic sector, it’s important for the IT industry to create more opportunities for women to not only enter the workforce but also lead it. For this, the industry needs to offer female mentorship and enough flexibility for women to feel inspired and support their growth and development. Further, we need to encourage more girls to pursue careers in technology by emphasising on a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curriculum from early on. This is a mindset shift and it requires initiatives and forward-thinking policies for the skilling and leadership training of women at all levels.

How is the business scenario in India, USA and UAE for Indian exporters of IT products, services and solutions?

Lakshmi - When you look at it from the digital and IT services perspective, some markets are early adopters and some are laggards with respect to India. The Indian Exporters need to cater to both ends of the spectrum. They must innovate and leverage the ‘Digital+Data’ combine on one end and also enable modernization of applications and cloud enablement on the other. The post-COVID 19 business scenario is looking bright as the perspective towards digital technologies and urgency with respect to its adoption have been very encouraging. Indian exporters of IT services are huge repositories of talented and skilled human capital and are well poised to ride this resurgent demand for IT products, solutions, and services.