Paola Bielli has been teaching at the Bocconi University, Milan for the past 30 years and she has seen the emergence of technology and how they have transformed businesses worldwide. Currently, she teaches the students of SDA Bocconi Asia Center in Mumbai. In a conversation with InsideIIM, she defines what ICT is, where are we standing in terms of technological interventions in business and what should be the skills/qualities business managers and leaders of tomorrow need to possess. This is the excerpt -
For our audience, tell us what exactly Information Systems are and why they are relevant for a B-school student in the present context?
Information systems are the set of digital technologies (HW and SW solutions), people and principles which enables an organisation to run its operations and make decisions. As you realize, they are not purly technical components but they include the human factors and business processes and management objectives explaining I.S. success (or failure). B-school students must be aware of the relevance of I.S. managerial decisions because they might take those decisions in their future corporate life.
You have been teaching at Bocconi University for over 30 years now! How do you think the technical landscape has changed in all these years and why do you think ICT has become an integral part of the management education of today?
It is true when I started some years ago I.S. were present in the largest corporations while SMEs had a pragmatic approach: if technologies help us, we use them otherwise we go on with traditional solutions. Today, the “traditional option” does no longer exist, even the smallest business, even artisans do use digital platforms because their customers expect them to. In B-schools education digital technologies are at the same time a medium to learn and a functional topic we teach our students. We all have experienced the relevance of e-learning in the past two years. In almost one night we moved from on campus to home learning. Luckily professors and students at B-schools were ready to embrace such a revolution.
You have a research paper titled, ‘the cost of ICT illiteracy’. Tell us a bit about that and what exactly we are losing out on if we are not paying attention to the same?
The research you mention shows clearly the financial impact of a partial use of Information and Communication Technologies. We all experience that the technologies we have in our pocket (mobile phones) or on our desks have many more functionalities we even know. And this is a pity because we still waste time in manually doing tasks or in correcting errors. In organisations where time and errors mean “money” it is unacceptable. In our multiannual studies we verified that very often this situation derives from limited training: the workforce is given new platforms without adequate preparation. This is because companies are under time constraints, or they want to save some budget or because they believe their human resources can learn while doing. But we think this choice is wrong: the initial digital training can save in the medium run time and money as the platform use is more in line with expectations.
For management students of today, how is ICT providing more and more career opportunities. What are some of the sectors that students can get placed in through in-depth learning and understanding of the same?
ICT are clearly an important factor for final placement both for students with an ICT focus as well as for others.
ICT background with a management education are more than welcome in all IT service provider and consulting companies which support customer companies in implementing and upgrading their I.S. The B-school graduates with these profiles are the “liason officers” between users and service providers. They speak the language of ICT and translate it into the business environment. In addition to this, they monitor the technology evolution and suggest new areas and new opportunities to grow the effectiveness of the company.
Students with different specialisations but confident with the use of digital platforms are welcome by corporates because their onboarding time is shorter and they are fast in professionally behaving in a business environment. Their analyses are data driven, their decisions are based on simulations and what-if scenarios and they can launch surveys and consumer behavior analysis with the proper technical tools.
COVID has pushed all of us to the brink of technical dependency. One sphere that has gotten a lot of attention during this time is e-learning. What is your prediction on the future of e-learning and its effectiveness and how a better and robust ICT understanding is needed to achieve that?
What we experienced in the past months is that technologies are there, ready to use. Maybe we still suffer from connectivity divides (remote areas still have less bandwith and speed than urban areas and Tier-1 cities have better communication infrastructure than the rest of the country), but what really makes the difference is the teaching approach. How can we combine e-learning with personal experience? How can we leverage on the richness and diversity we have in our students sitting at home? How can we keep motivation and interest at distance? For me and for my colleagues both in Mumbai and Milan these years were years of experimentation and pilot projects where we tried several approaches and solutions to get the best out of this unplanned situation. I cannot say we solved the problem, but for sure we learnt a lot and we are still learning. “Hybrid” probably is the keyword: in presence and at distance; teaching and simulations; individual and group assignments… we are combining different approaches, but the digital platform is the key requirement.
Tech giants - AWS, Google, MS - are technically running the entire world. The digital know-how of these big MNCs combined with the huge databases they have built make them march ahead of their competition. How do you think ICT knowledge is relevant in these big corporations and what should be a student’s approach towards the same when he/she walks out of their B-school campus and wants to be part of such setups?
The tech giants are today the source of technical innovation for any industry and application area. They have knowhow, computing power, data to lead the innovation. The technical profiles are very specialised in those organisations and you have to like the working approach (maximum specialisation). For application roles you need to understand technology enough to comprehend its potential and be creative enough to imagine, invent how to use it various cases and industries. Usually it is a very competitive environment where time pressure, result pressure and flexibility are very strong. The right mix for B-school graduates!
How big do you consider ‘Alexa’ to be in the world of ICT and its transformation in the current world?
Alexa is an interesting case as it represents commonization of Artificial Intelligence on large scale with impacts on consumers and on technology development. Consumers become familiar with AI-based interfaces opening the path to more disruptive solutions and use cases. IT vendors learn from the use and refine their projects. This is the way innovation takes place in our era.
At SDA Bocconi Asia Center, have you had stories of students who have had a lot of fun at your class and you had to devise newer techniques for the same?
Teaching my subject especially in India is not trivial. Techies at one side think they know the subject and at the other side they expect to use technologies. Freshers cannot refer to company experience and therefore they cannot link the course with their previous knowledge. What I do is to propose lot of case studies, incidents, guest speakers so that the students start from a situation or a problem and can then introduce technologies as a driver for change. I can measure the impact of my courses when after graduation alumni come back to me and say “you know, while I was experiencing this situation, your words came to my mind…”
With Data becoming the ‘deciding factor’ for many businesses. How important do you think understanding and knowledge of new age technologies are? Which are some of them that students must absolutely know or develop an understanding about?
Data will be the deciding factor in few years from now. Current technologies from AI to IoT produce huge amounts of data which still sleep in our I.S. Data analytics will be for sure the engine to get value out of this gold mines. But more than technology or quantitative methods the ability to understand data and link the data evidences to the business will make the difference. In this field B-school students have a competitive advantage as their curriculum encompasses data-oriented decisions and data modeling. They are the right miners for companies data resources.
What is your advice to the students walking in with a perspective that ‘tech’ is difficult?
In life we all experienced some difficulties in one field or the other, but I am sure that we also realised that refusing the field because of its expected difficulty would transform it into a blocking obstacle. At the managerial level technology must be understood for its potentials not used or developed. Understanding and imagining spaces to use it in the company environment is possible to anyone. Worst case scenario? Select the right techies in your team to explain you the technologies and work together with them to imagine their future implications to your business. This strategy is effective during your B-school life, but also in corporations. The best managers are those who have the best specialists working for them.