The year was 1998. I was one among the many exasperated recruits huddled together in a discernibly squashed conference room, awaiting the stomach-churning start of a frightful-more-than-fanciful ‘induction process’, one of those rare occasions when the HR folks of most companies are at their jovial best, even reserving a (give-away) chuckle to grace the rehearsed sermons that blatantly underline the ‘dream job that has come your way!’ Oddly enough, I was also the odd (old) one out in the sea of chirpy freshers brimming with starry-eyed ambition, straight out of engineering campuses and a good six-seven years younger to me.
Just when I was contemplating the turbulent consequences of chucking my well paying job as a financial journalist with a reputed business magazine to launch an ‘afterthought’ career in mainframe computing, a self-possessed voice broke the thought chain of my inner voice.
“Hello, I am Barve,” he announced in the introduction round, and I sensed an uncanny courage of conviction in his body language, lurking in the British-like demeanour (which earned him the nickname Brit Barve) that could easily be mistaken for pomposity. Little did I know then how right I was in gauging the mind and method of this young lad who later became a dear friend, courtesy an intuitive relationship that has stood the test of time, age, geography, and circumstances. Many years later, I was thrilled to find a colleague from a business process reengineering project mention his name with reverence as a top achiever, when we accidentally found a common connect with him in the course of a casual conversation.
It was heartening reuniting with him on LinkedIn soil, which has time and again surprised me with wholesome opportunities for relishing the most absorbing conversations with likeminded souls that otherwise seem next-to-impossible in person, given the time and space constraints that govern real life encounters.
While most ‘friends’ from that historic ‘induction round’ have made the cardinal error of mistaking their employers' brands for their individual value props, identifying {not merely aligning} themselves with the ‘chairs’ they swirl and the ‘coasts’ they traverse, his oven-fresh detachment is such a breather, so are his organically cultivated perspectives on life and work, and all things between and beyond.
Here’s a tete-a-tete with Manish Barve, which is a peek into his persona, as also a smart summary of his tech and domain insights. Here we go!
Strangely enough, we never discussed our formative years during our Syntel days. So to begin with, could you go down memory lane…
Way back then, my life was quite sedate, I must say. Typical of most parents of our generation, the expectation of good grades was implicit but never overbearing. I was not a stand-out student albeit invariably in the zone of decent scores. To me, and I impress this on both my sons, I was lucky to have a conducive culture in both schools I attended, where the focus on how a student shapes up was not relative to his or her peers. While we did not understand its significance then, today, during school re-unions we realize how our batch churned out students who ventured into diverse fields.. from the Armed Forces and the Indian Forest Services to Script Writing and Fine Arts. While the boring ones chose safe bets like science and engineering, like I did, the fact that many of my school friends today have conquered offbeats forts in uncharted territories is an inspiring narrative for all of us.
So, software was not your chosen career?
Not at all! Writing in a language that only machines understand and makes them go faster is hardly fun. Ironically, today with Generative AI taking the world by storm and people discussing ethics and power of AI, I am reminded about this Marathi science fiction book by Prof. J. V. Narlikar, ‘Vaman Parat Na Aala’ (Vaman never returned), and maybe, we are now at that critical threshold, where designing the right harness with software may be the need of the hour to preclude things going haywire!
I was more into English and History during my early education years. I was, and still am, an avid reader of how some of the events from the past drive today’s decisions, no matter whether it is contemporary History or dates back centuries ago. What drives my curiosity is a deep dive into the context of the decisions that triggered an event or a chain of events. We often castigate luminaries from the bygone era without delving into the circumstances, and to me that elusive aspect of history bears a magnetic pull. The love of English as a form of expression came in very early in school amply accentuated by the plays, debates, and essay writing competitions I was part of.
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How was the transition from the classroom to the workplace?
I guess we were amongst the few early batches of passouts who formed that group of campus or bulk hires. While today the term has lost its appeal, back then it was a chip on the shoulder if you got thru from that sea of potential hires. Looking back it all looks daft and if I can dial back I would first try and lose the one dimensional perspective that many of us had when we came into these new jobs. The one good thing that did happen though was that colleagues who became friends back then, remained as much throughout. We had this core of friends back in Syntel - we were about 7 or 8 of us - and while a couple have moved on, others can still be called upon when it matters.
Experiences...overall positive...we had some great downtime with this core group that I mentioned above, traveling to places outside Mumbai during weekends, we used to have these Saturday lunch outs which were adhered to very religiously and workwise too it always felt waking up to :-)...We all moved on to different jobs after the first 2 - 3 years but I will be the first to admit that it was those initial years with good folks that made the transition fun.
You worked on IBM Mainframe during the formative years of your career. How was the experience?
In terms of computing architecture, I am yet to see a more rock solid manifestation than a IBM mainframe. Even today, despite the advent of Cloud architecture, most of the core functions of Fortune 500 orgs, run on an IBM mainframe. It had its quirks in terms of ease of use, but for sheer power and simplicity of programming, nothing comes close. Some of the principles like CICS or design of relationships in a DB2 database, are so fundamental that even today, despite a wide range of options, there is inherent goodness in some of these ancient warhorses.
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Could you summarise the evolution of the cloud scene as you see it?
Presuming we are talking in terms of modernization options to cloud from IBM Mainframe, yes, this has multiple levers. Primary amongst them are Cost and Skill. Businesses are increasingly looking at getting a pulse on compute and storage costs, and IBM itself is looking to unshackle some of their tech to support businesses adopt what is called 'Private Cloud', in essence all the iron clad security of the old world, with a modern Opex based cost structure.
However Private Cloud is a bit late in take-off relative to the public cloud, and as orgs rewire themselves to the so called Digital Transformation, modernization to Public Cloud is the real deal. AWS as one of the pioneers in this space has significantly ramped up the availability, resilience, feature richness and cost optimization over the last 17 years of its operation. The fact that we have diverse set of customers all across the globe, moving key workloads to AWS, is testament to the trust that businesses have placed with us in terms of ensuring secure, continuous and cost optimized operations.
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What in your reckoning are the key challenges to data modernization? How do you counter them in your work sphere?
This is a slightly larger question but in general, when it comes to data modernization orgs need to keep 3 things in mind 1/ Consumer of the Data 2/Owner of the Data 3/Quality of the Data. There are obviously aspects like Scale, Recency [applicable in regulated industries], and Velocity of Data [e.g. IOT] but the triad that I called out earlier should be the principles around which guard rails are established.
There is no one way to skin this and in our regular interactions with customers it comes down to type of industry, associated regulation, organizational policies and processes and internal stakeholders that drive some of the choices that we have to make.
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Your thoughts on the changing face of business intelligence, and how is the business world gearing up to deliver what it takes?
I will answer this in two parts.
Intelligence, whether Human or Artificial, has always leveraged raw data to draw inferences or patterns and make suitable decisions. This is since time immemorial. Even if I were to look at the past 80 odd years of the first advent of principles of computing using machines [a la Turing] came about, data was always at the forefront. And, if we were to go back about 3 decades, machines were built by feeding tons of labelled data [training data] that could outplay some of the most intelligent folks on the planet at their own game [aka chess].
What started changing over the last decade and accelerated over the last 3 years or so was the ability of the machines to learn basis minimal training data and provide reasonably accurate predictions on a much larger random data. What I mean is, machines with the help of massive computing power and advanced algorithms started to provide these patters or insights that were seemingly not elicited earlier.
This is where the real convergence of Data and AI started to evolve where so called invisible relations or anomalies started to be fleshed out by machines. The business teams suddenly seized on this incredible potential from this confluence. This was much beyond the standard business intelligence reports which were made available to them.
Brings me to the other part. The business world has realized the proverbial gold mine that is on offer here if they adopt this ground breaking tech in the right way. And they have started at the very top where we now have CXO roles specific for Data and Analytics [CDO / CAO] to carve out business strategy, we have the CFO who is now the custodian of the data in most orgs managing the aspects like Governance / Policies / Regulation, we have the CTIO entrusted with Data security and finally we have the Marketing or Operations Org [CMO / COO] managing the outcomes or insights from the underlying data
This to me is now the new baseline where Tech is no longer a backroom conversation in business meetings, but a key lever to drive business metrics.
Can your recount any use cases of predictive analysis, NLP in user interfaces, automated code refactoring et al.
There's a sea of these across Managing CX [Chatbots, Virtual Assistants, Hyper Personalization, Recommendation Engines], Content Management [Search, Curation, Usage Analytics, CDP], Business Ops [Video KYC, Doc Processing, Data Augmentation, Process Optimization [e.g. in INS where companies now use ML driven STP]. Code Generation tools abound as well. There is Code Whisperer from Amazon, Copilot from Microsoft just to name a few
Data modernisation merits a paradigm shift in thought and action, more than merely the transition from ‘as is’ to ‘to be’. Your thoughts on the criticality of re-engineering of processes and governance (and any experiences if you can cite to drive home the moot point(s).
I guess I can respond basis two experiences from the recent past. One from a Telco operator where as part of a merger, one of the critical asks was around Managing Data Quality in the merged entity. The other was from a Insurance company where the ask was to transform their Analytics / AIML platform as part of an overall Digital Transformation strategy.
In both instances, given these were local entities, the scale of data was humongous. Both were regulated industries so aspects on Data Security, managing PII were paramount.
A 'Tech First' approach in both instances was presumed to be the ideal approach. Put the best tools in, re-point the data to the new systems, re-run the models on the updated Data Lake and you have solved the problem.
Luckily, we didn't go that perfunctory route. One of the fundamental things with Data is the relevance of Context. And process / policies hold this essence or functional nuance of data. As a famous stat guru once said, a false positive in the context of Fraud Management is still ok, you may end up chasing a wrong guy. However a false positive in the Healthcare industry can have a huge fall-out, a treatment basis incorrect diagnosis can be fatal.
So, as part of both these initiatives, we engaged two groups at every stage of the journey. The Operations Team that managed Third Party and internal legal aspects and the Customer Experience Team that managed the communications with customer's customer, end user. This was the secret sauce for success of these initiatives because we had our PMO liaise between both these groups on a daily basis to ensure we had a so called data pipeline with maker-checker marked out as milestones at key steps. It also helped us prioritize tech drops in a manner where there was additional manual oversight during the initial phase wise roll-out.
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Can you narrate the thrill and chill of customer interactions over the years, any instances that linger in your memory.
There are many thankfully both local and overseas narratives that will fill reams! I guess I could talk on two: one from decades gone by, my first Y2K project for a logistics organization in the US. These were the pre-Y2K days when doomsday was predicted by many lest code was not fixed. As naive college passouts, we were wired to believe that an incorrect 'IF' loop will destroy the world!
So, after all the internal test cycles had passed and countless hours were spent in office 'saving the world', the pilot day dawned on us. We were on this conference call with the customer folks in the US who had their actual truckers on standby to receive shipment which, provided our code actually did the needful, would transfer the cargo from the warehouse to the forklift right down to the truck. As the operator punched all the data on the screen, we bit our non-existent finger nails, as the code kept hopping across the 'IF' loops like a roulette machine, and finally rested itself in the slot for releasing the shipment. Armageddon avoided :-) It sounds puerile now, but it was good fun back then.
As age and sense bulged, the sense of wonderment dissipated, but a couple of years back, when my team delivered an algorithm that weeded out potential anomalous transactions with significant higher accuracy, it was a special moment for us, especially when one of the seniors from the customer end called out the enormity of what the program or algorithm could now achieve.
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Please share a few details of your personal voyage – passion pursuits in particular…
Honestly, nothing to write home about! Given the back-breaking commute on weekdays, weekend is invariably all about catching up on the pending chores. But yes, I do write at times, more so about daily experiences and interactions, as also mini travelogues. It was nothing more than a blog all this while, but I do intend to summarize the disparate notes around defining themes someday soon.
One thing I find increasingly ironic is that although my day-to-day work is all about adding intelligence to machines to help businesses solve problems, I sense an acute need for adding real intelligence to address the manifold challenges of many areas and zones beyond work, where sheer common sense, not software, can fix things better! I see in that opportunity a potential plan for the road ahead. Let’s see!
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Brit Barve’s expression “Let’s see” bears the unassuming charm and quiet authority akin to Yashvant Kanetkar’s legendary work of folklore status ‘Let us C!’ and hence seems ripe with interesting possibilities. For me, personally, the self-deprecating poise and prose of mavericks like Manish Barve is a cherished treasure, amid the commotion of croaking ‘experts’ all around us, who at the slightest provocation are keen to enlighten poor Alan Turing on the essence of Artificial Intelligence or run crash courses on entrepreneurship for the benefit of a certain Steve Jobs!
While we await Manish Barve’s potential plan to translate into action, some of our holier-than-thou experts would do well to mull over the famous quote of the great Anglo-Irish philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke on the revolution in France, albeit in a different context,
“Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.”