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Thursday, 23 April 2015 01:03 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Colombo University Department of Business Economics,Acting Director Institute ofHuman Resource and Advancement & Head Prof. H. D. Karunaratne
Nable CEO and Managing Director Peter D’ Almeida
The Business and Technology Conference, the first conference organised by the Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT) which focused on Business and Technology research, was held recently with the objective of connecting with researchers and enabling APIIT to take another step forward as a higher education provider.
The CEO of APIIT Lanka, Dr. Athula Pitigala-Arachchi, in his welcome address said the institute took pride providing an excellent education to students.
“We have a short history, however over the last five years or so we have paid much attention to research as well. We have organised this conference to develop our scope of research and interact with researchers from higher education institutes across the country,” he said.
Prof. H. D. Karunaratne, Acting Director Institute of Human Resource and Advancement and Head of the Department of Business Economics, University of Colombo shed light on the importance of creating knowledge and moving towards what is known as a knowledge-based society.
“The meaning of university is the creation of knowledge, dissemination and of course ultimately it should reach the community for the sustainable development of society. There are two main universal laws, one is change and the second is natural growth. All religions, all philosophies and work done by mankind abide by these laws. How to adapt these natural laws in the business sector is what we are looking at. Sustainability is a key issue for any organisation because we know that the business environment is changing all over the world with the ICT revolution and many other reasons which are making it more competitive.
“Increasing competition is the most important thing. You have to strengthen your skills as well as your knowledge. In this line, research is very important for academics as well as those who are studying different fields. When operating in a knowledge society, the knowledge is input which has different characteristics than consumable resources. Resources are limited but human needs and wants are growing. However, knowledge is unlimited and day by day this knowledge is created and when it reaches more places, it generates a spill-over effect. So knowledge becomes a new factor to re-input later as an unlimited factor. When we talk about a knowledge society, we consider knowledge workers, knowledge consumers and knowledge stakeholders. In today’s world, knowledge is one of the most important things,” he said as he set the premise for the presentation.
Prof. Karunaratne went on to explain the importance of sustainability in a business environment and its fundamental challenges.
“Sustainability comes from three main areas: people, profit and the planet. If we go into more details it can be converted to social, economic and environmental contribution to sustainability. We are concerned with social issues, social phenomena and what’s happening in society because ultimately what we are doing is for the betterment of people.
“In the economic aspect we see that without producing new things we can’t make people better off. We have to go for higher production; we have to go for new kinds of goods and services as well as new methodologies and new techniques. Economic factors are very important today especially when it comes to competition; you’re supposed to reduce cost, increase efficiency and perform better than others. This is one other aspects of sustainability. Finally, sustainability links to environment; as we know global warming, the tsunami and other environmental damage to the world occurs because people have neglected environmental factors in the past.”
Using the example of technology used for oil drilling, which happens to be the most advanced technology today, he explained how the world was sustaining demand for oil by searching for oil deep in the Earth’s core as oil from many surface layers have already been extracted.
He highlighted that each working day, an additional 500 vehicles were registered in Sri Lanka and oil was required for this increasing number and this demand somehow needed to be fulfilled. Having said that, he also explained how extracting more oil would not be the solution in the long run and how other energy sources needed to be deployed. Through this example, he showed that technology could make a difference and yet it had to keep changing with time in order to maintain sustainability.
Prof. Karunaratne spoke further about the Sri Lankan education system which was not geared to create entrepreneurs and was lacking a proper structure. He mentioned that our education system was in its infancy compared with institutions in other countries like Japan where every student gets the opportunity to receive a university education and likewise.
Furthermore, he discussed the lack of literacy in this country despite government statistics pointing to the opposite.
“The majority of Sri Lanka is financially illiterate. Are you financially literate? What is financial literacy? Everybody likes to get the maximum salary in an organisation but through this way will the business be sustained? The best example is the public sector salary increment of Rs. 10,000 but what is the contribution for productivity? How do we manage our economy? Who is paying the price? The majority of consumers are paying the price and the business sector is paying the price as are the taxpayers. So what will happen in the sustainable business?
“This is not the fault of a political party or a particular politician. This happens because the youth is very weak in financial literacy. The lack of financial literacy education in primary schools in Sri Lanka is the start of the problem. Primary, secondary or tertiary education hasn’t got any lessons on this topic. It’s important to teach students how to earn money, how to save money and how to grow with the money,” he explained.
Afterwards, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of N*able Ltd. Peter D’ Almeida delivered a very interesting presentation on his take of sustainability and the factors that drive businesses.
D’ Almeida spoke extensively about how he learnt the concept of sustainability at a very early stage in life, as the youngest in a family of ten, after the death of his father. He highlighted that management, sacrifice and smart thinking were needed for sustainability. The management of scarce resources was the essence of sustainability, he stated.
“At Nable, our business is to enable information technology to produce business outcomes. When you say technology, a lot of people think of IT because that is where most of the progress is happening. But in reality technology is actually about a new way of doing things. That is the essence of business and technology. Once at an event, 2000 CEOs were asked, as you face the future what is your biggest challenge. At the top of my head was technology but no, it was creative thinking. Thinking directly relates to literacy. Education in Sri Lanka fools us into believing that this is a highly literate country and we then propagate this idea. Forget about creative thinking, thinking is what we look for in person when hiring. Sadly, our children are not taught to become entrepreneurs. Learning is something that is not facilitated in our schools and that’s because we stick to standardised testing. Students are taught to just memorise information or produce answers quickly. It’s sad to see children today who are being prepared to sit for the scholarship exam from the time they start school,” he added.
Peter underscored the importance of letting students learn by questioning. He pointed out that a lot of local schools and the local curriculums didn’t allow students to explore, learn and think. This situation was somehow curbing their ability to become entrepreneurs and take a step forward.
“There is technology improvement but have people’s lives been affected. Look at the divide in society today, extreme wealth at one end and abject poverty at the other. This is not just a matter of socialism but a matter of survival in capitalist economic system. Today we have Big Data so we can validate these points. The rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of growth. So the past is eating up the future.”
Furthermore, he explained that businesses were now driven by knowledge. The faster you close the knowledge gap, the better off you are. A life of a company is still 10 years. Global companies like Kodak and Nokia just faded away. They didn’t want to differentiate and someone else with that knowledge understood how to make use of it and gained maximum value, he stated.
He emphasised that it was important to look at smart ways to drive business. Using the Apple Watch and Apple Pay as examples he explained how companies that made huge differences had captured maximum value and grown.
He then elaborated on the cultural aspects that hold people back such as shame and fear and how these could negatively impact the creative thinking of an individual. He also spoke about what qualities needed to be inculcated in an organisational culture if it were to make meaningful progress. He stressed that the main thing was to encourage knowledge-sharing among employees so it would not be held back. Employees should be rewarded for how much they share and how well they got along with others. Moreover, kindness should be promoted. People should be kind to one another and not discriminate against each other.
There’s a lot of inequality in the world today. For instance, one percent of the population owns 50% of the wealth and this needs to change, he added.
He concluded his speech by sharing an incident involving his daughter who is a writer living in New York. The story detailed how she helped save the life of an African-American man who was sick and lying on the pavement while many people just walked by; and the nearby restaurant she sought help from turned her down by calling the police instead of an ambulance. Through this example, he highlighted the importance of kindness and indiscrimination.
The rest of the program dealt with documentary presentations made by researchers who submitted articles for the conference.
Pix by Lasantha Kumara
