Current Affairs
in
Organisation Theory
Usefull for Complete Paper II
Upto July 2017
Ranker’s Classes
Unit 1
NR Narayana Murthy views:
Question 1: What makes for the longevity of a company?
· Good governance is the foundation on which the longevity of a company rests. Such a company will live healthily for over 200-300 years.
· Good corporate governance is about enhancing shareholder value on a sustainable basis while ensuring fairness, transparency and accountability in every action vis-à-vis every stakeholder – customers, employees, investors, vendor-partners, government of the land and society.
Question 2: Between strategy and culture, what do you believe is more important?
· Peter Drucker, the famous management guru, once told me in the nineties that culture eats strategy for lunch. Therefore, culture is the bedrock on which successful strategy rests.
· Culture is what brings you joy, what makes you sad, what makes you proud, what you value in life, and how you spend your time and money. A good company’s culture is to seek respect from every stakeholder in everything it does.
· Such a company will strive to ensure that honesty, decency, fairness, transparency, accountability, compassion for less fortunate colleagues, leadership-by example, concern for the society and excellence are on the front burner.
Communication is essential element of organization: Bernard
AI technician sucked into engine: 'Communication gap' may have led to accident at Mumbai airport
Darwin’s theory at work in e-commerce space in India
· Flipkarts and Snapdeals are forcing Ambanis and Birlas of supermarket chains to join the burgeoning e-commerce landscape.
o At the same time, a knockout round is at play in the online as well as offline retail worlds where ‘survival of the fittest theory’ is forcing weaker and smaller players to either close the shop or get merged with stronger rivals — a trend that is likely to consolidate further in 2016.
o This was exemplified by the likes of retail chain, Shoppers Stop, tying up with Snapdeal and Amazon besides ramping up its own website to increase its online sales.
o Mahindra Retail, which acquired Babyoye.com in February this year, integrated its entire e-commerce business into Babyoye.com and later re-branded its offline retail network from Mom & Me to Babyoye by Mahindra.
o Likewise, Aditya Birla Group launched its e-commerce portal for apparel, abof.com, as a one-stop fashion portal for apparel, footwear and accessories for men and women. The e-commerce sector is a sunrise sector from an investment point of view.
o The government had given a further boost to the e-commerce sector by opening up FDI in the business to customer (B2C) segment in a calibrated manner.
o While preparing for the e-commerce challenge, the brick and mortar operators also went on to fortify their traditional stronghold through consolidation. Aditya Birla Group merged all its apparel businesses from Aditya Birla Nuvo and Madura Garments Lifestyle Retail into one entity — Pantaloons Fashion & Retail, which was later renamed as Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd.
What is company’s agility quotient?
· ‘State of Agile’ survey, brought out by technology company Version One. According to the survey, companies that ‘went agile’ were able to deal with changing priorities, increase team productivity and improve project visibility.
· “Unlike the ‘V’ model where the entire responsibility of a project rests with the project head, in Scrum everyone is made accountable. He says in Scrum, client feedback is obtained in two weeks, as against six months in the ‘V’ model.
· Although Scrum had its origins in the software industry, it is used today in almost every sector. “Filmmakers, educational institutions and an increasing number of manufacturing companies are adopting the Scrum framework. We help companies get their HR practices aligned with their current challenges,”. Agile methodologies are essentially people-oriented. “Agile is a philosophy where people matter over the process. Enterprises need to identify what business goals they want to achieve and then use Agile methods, practices, principles and values to reach the desired goals.”
Impact of IT on organizations
Infosys 'releases' 9,000 employees due to automation
· Infosys has trained about 490 people in a first batch of machine learning and the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
· Infosys has "released" 8,000-9,000 employees in the past one year because of automation of lower-end jobs. These employees are now working on more advanced projects.
· Most big IT services companies are investing heavily in automation of processes in their traditional businesses like BPO, application management and infrastructure management.
· Wipro has an automation platform called Holmes. Around 3,200 people were released by Wipro through automation to do more innovative work.
One nation, one tax department: I-T takes cue from GST
The one-nation, one-tax principle that underlines the goods and services tax (GST could be adopted in a much more broader sense by the income tax department through a path-breaking initiative on jurisdiction-free assessment.
This would mean that a taxpayer in Mumbai could be assessed by an income tax officer located in Patna, a significant leap toward eradicating corruption by reducing the need for face-to-face contact between citizens and tax officials to the absolute minimum besides speeding up processing.
The move, which will require a change in the income tax law, would also end the relevance of various geographic divisions in the form of wards and circles with the whole country becoming one jurisdiction. This, it is hoped, will put an end to a system in which bribery is said to be used as a tool to ease processes through human intervention.
A high-level internal report of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) recommended the move, which is under active consideration.
The government may consider implementing the process in the next financial year.
The key catalyst for such a significant reform is the massive shift toward e-filing of returns, which is already jurisdiction-free with returns going to the Central Processing Centre in Bengaluru.
Multiple Benefits
· In line with this move towards e-processing, the income tax department may even opt for e-scrutiny for all limited scrutiny cases where assesses can explain the transactions in question over email.
· A complete jurisdiction-free environment would make geography redundant and the income tax department completely faceless for taxpayers. Any review or scrutiny of return could happen anywhere in India through an electronic interface, ensuring that the payee is not forced to interact with officials.
· The board has in recent times taken a number of initiatives to reduce the face-to-face contact between tax officials and assessees and make the system non-adversarial.
How web chatbots are putting millions of low-level jobs at risk
· Most businesses use chatbots because it is easy to integrate on their communication platforms.
· HDFC Bank is using chatbots (named Eva) — a software robot to help visitors looking for products and services online. Eva has handled laks of customer chats. On busy weekdays, she is on “concurrent chat” with over 150 bank customers. “Eva is a ‘conversational agent’ and she helps us connect with our large customer base. For us, this is a technological leap to old conversational banking,” explains Nitin Chugh, country head – digital banking, HDFC Bank.
· Eva is equipped to handle 70–80% of routine queries posed by HDFC customers. The bank’s website is visited by over 1.5 million users every month. “Eva is for people who like to chat and get information online. Eva is among 500 bots and virtual personal assistants (VPAs, like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa) currently operational in India.
· Software research labs across the globe are locked in a race to create bots that are brainier than the rest - and mimic human beings the closest. These bots would, eventually, man the communication gateways of major private banks, telecom service providers, travel companies, e-commerce portals, private insurers and even drug manufacturers.
· It makes business sense to employ bots to do routine, boring jobs… By doing so, companies’ll be able to lower operational costs and also serve more customers at a time.
· The bot “reads” or “understands” the customer query and throws up an appropriate answer (from the stored knowledge bank). Over time, with constant manual “updation” of the knowledge bank, the bot is able to respond to even more complex customer queries.
· Bots are cultured and customised to bring about a “human touch” to responses processed out. Many a time, this is done at the behest of companies that employ these bots.
· Almost all Indian private banks are at various stages of developing their own bots. HDFC, Kotak, Axis and ICICI Bank are running pilot programmes (involving higher level bots) across various platforms.
· Bots are also used within the bank – by customer care executives… It helps executives offer appropriate solutions to customers and also have a meaningful dialogue with them.
· Companies like Vodafone and Airtel are running trials to put their bots on various communication platforms.
THREAT TO HUMANS
· There is an increasing fear of bots taking over the jobs of human beings – and if it ever comes to that, the thriving BPO industry (call centres and voice processes) in emerging markets would be the most impacted.
· “Businesses employ bots to reduce their cost and protect margins… If bots are put to work, businesses can save a lot of labour cost,.”
· “Business will use bots for lower level transactions only… At that level, bots may eat into a lot of mundane jobs done by human beings. The counterpoint here is, higher bot technology will give rise to more high-value jobs where humans would be required,” Datar says.
· “Chatbots can allow organisations to work more efficiently by minimising repetitive work for agents. Used properly, they can reduce wait times by automated ‘commonly asked queries,’ clarifies Horn, adding, “They can even reduce the average handle time by suggesting responses while the agent is speaking with the customer, leading to faster resolution.”
Davos bosses brace for big technology shocks. Executives expect an artificial intelligence machine to be sitting on a corporate board within the next decade
Such innovations, coupled with the rise of robots, could automate vast numbers of jobs
Such things may be science fiction today but they will be scientific fact by 2025 as the world enters an era of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing, according to executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Nearly half of those questioned also expect an artificial intelligence machine to be sitting on a corporate board of directors within the next decade. Welcome to the next industrial revolution.
Fourth Industrial Revolution
After steam, mass production and information technology, the so-called "fourth industrial revolution" will bring ever faster cycles of innovation, posing huge challenges to companies, workers, governments and societies alike.
"There is an economic surplus that is going to be created as a result of this fourth industrial revolution,"
Robots on the march
Robots are already on the march, moving from factories into homes, hospitals, shops, restaurants and even war zones, while advances in areas like artificial neural networks are starting to blur the barriers between man and machine.
A new report from UBS released in Davos predicts that extreme levels of automation and connectivity will worsen already deepening inequalities by widening the wealth gap between developed and developing economies.
"The fourth industrial revolution has potentially inverted the competitive advantage that emerging markets have had in the form of low-cost labour. It is likely that it will exacerbate inequality if policy measures are not taken.
General Motors is confronting the threat of driverless cars - another science fiction that has become science fact - or Banks facing competition from digital "fintech" start-ups.
Such innovations, coupled with the rise of robots in both the manufacturing and service sectors, could automate vast numbers of jobs. Oxford University researchers predicted in 2013, for example, that 47 percent of U.S. jobs were at risk.
· Machines now offer brain as well as brawn, threatening professions previously seen as immune, such as entry-level journalism or routine financial analysis.
· Pessimists fear this will hollow out middle-income, middle-class jobs on an unprecedented scale, with the WEF itself predicting that more than 5 million jobs could be lost in 15 major economies by 2020.
Cognitive technology
India at centre of cognitive tech: IBM CEO
Chairman, President and CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty has said that cognitive technology is the fourth in the process of evolution after cloud, big data and mobile; and India is at the centre of this new technological innovation. “Twenty-first century belongs to India, and it’s the great ecosystem that will enable this,” she said.
Ms. Rometty was speaking at the IBM Watson India Summit here on Tuesdaywhere the company showcased how cognitive systems were transforming businesses and customer outcomes. “What began as one natural language question-answering system, has now 30 services powered by more than 50 underlying technologies that help innovators to create new apps and businesses. It’s important to add more value than merely going digital,” she said.
Over 500 start-ups and companies across 29 industries were embedding the cognitive technology APIs into their businesses, and over 100 of them had brought out cognitive-enabled products and services into the market. IBM has allocated $100 million for this.
Ms. Rometty said healthcare was one area where cognitive technology was making a big impact. Ajay Bakshi, Managing Director and CEO of Manipal Hospitals, which has partnered with IBM to use ‘Watson for Oncology’, said there was an acute shortage of oncologists in the country and cognitive technology would go a long way in providing better medical care for patients.
Stating that a lot of data are untapped, Vice President for IBM Watson Stephen Gold, said it’s not enough that an app can just tell you how many steps you walked in a day. It should be able to say if you walked a certain number of more steps, you would live a few years longer.
Signalling the opening up of the Watson ecosystem for business in India, IBM announced partnership with two companies that would develop cognitive computing solutions. InspireOne Technologies uses Watson in its Supernova application to empower employees to develop leadership capabilities; andTextient is making use of personality insights API along with features like sentiment analysis to generate a real-time reporton the aspects that are influencing a company’s brand strength.