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Sometime around 2004-05, I did a forecasting story on then booming Indian BPO industry. The CEO of one BPO company, who claimed (and I would love to believe him) that he always read my stories, called me and asked – if it was what I thought would happen or is it what I thought should happen. While I was trying to evade, he provided me the answer.
“Maybe, you started with the first as objective and ended up adding a couple of bullets about the second.” I would not have been able to confess better. Maybe, I did that not so consciously.
The reason I am remembering and sharing with you all after all these years is that he gave me a justification. “If you have actually done that, I do not know how it would be evaluated by your journalism standards, but from our perspective, it is the right mix. Someone credible needs to do that.”
I am not saying that what my colleague, Jatinder, has written in the IT NEXT November 2021 Cover Story is actually a mix of ‘woulds’ and ‘shoulds’. All I am saying is that, if you think so, I would be willing to still back the story.
Forecasting, and even if it is based on a structured survey of a large sample of respondents, is still not prediction. An astrologer can make prediction (not talking of accuracy; that is a dangerous area to tread into). An analyst or a journalist can make only forecast. The word itself means that it is an estimation.
The pandemic has proven how wrong all our forecast can go and how inadequate all our future planning can prove to be. All business continuity planning came to naught. But those who had a general sense of what the future would be – like more digitized business – could quickly figure out what they could do. If their businesses, this country and the world economy ran, it is because of their ability to ‘do something’ quickly. And that came neither because of detailed BCP/DR nor because these guys knew some magic. They knew the broad direction and they were good at thinking what could be done.
I would urge you to take the IT NEXT November 2021 Cover Story like that. It is a general direction of where things will be in 2022. Some trends are already visible. Some could happen in 2023 or 2024, because of a number of parameters impacting them. It is not that they will be there only between 1st January 2022 and 31st December 2022.
What is important is to know where things may change; where actions need to be; and what is a broader direction.
So, take the story in that spirit. Since a lot of it has come from you all, some of it may sound familiar. If it gives you even one trigger point, our purpose would have been achieved.
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