Technology thrives on discipline. The developed world recognized it very early and a majority of people in it were machine-savvy before the 1970s. Discipline of using technology goes along with civic discipline too. India, on the other hand, struggles with discipline in every aspect - civic, technological, political as well as in structuring thoughts. Sometimes, regulation itself is a subject of disrespect in public fields.

In the newer digital era, this divide becomes multifold. ‘Things’ that constitute Internet of Things (IoT), produce enormous amount of devices and data that themselves are entropic. A wild third-world mind and structure adds to this volatility, ruling out the possibility of regulation specifically from a discipline standpoint and not government mandated.

Whereas for developed countries - those who have been steering technological innovation - the new digital universe offers exponential benefits directly related to their state of discipline. Sensing, extracting, processing, transferring, and analyzing the exploding heterogeneous data/device - for them, these are opportunities to exploit using their naturally ordered culture.

Other consideration in this context, is the need for and formation of newer ‘Standards’. Creating and stabilizing standards of digital technology are challenging even to the developed countries. Burst of such (may be short living) standards include protocol standards in diverse IoT environments, environmental standards for devices, privacy and access standards, exposure of API/data standards, consumption standards in addition to government policies.

Broadly, the challenges for India in IoT attributed to cultural discipline are:

• Inhibited participation in standards forums: Traditionally India's participation in standards forums has been minimal on account of the absence of structured mindset and the government priorities for growth elsewhere.
• Lagging participation in wider technology supply-chains (mainly hardware fabrications): This has been a China + East Asia monopoly, and transforming culture towards innovation require this supply chain to be nurtured internally.
• High environmental impact caused by devices: e-Waste is an added ingredient to the accumulated landfills, forget the collateral damages of air, water, earth contaminations.

Yes, these are discipline challenges of current time too, however the intensity and volume of future impact is exponential in third-world countries. And with that said, opportunities galore in chaos anyways.

Praveen Kodikkambrath - Practice Head & Principal Architect, Microsoft Practice, Wipro Limited

Praveen is a Practice Head and Principal Architect with Microsoft Practice, Business Application Services, at Wipro Limited. He brings with him, 17+ years of experience in development, consulting, delivery, sales & pre-sales, go-to-market activities, CxO and Analyst interactions, innovation and marketing.

His area of expertise has been Application Estate Transformation. He has built transformation services to scale, including management of services & strategy, customer accounts, solutions development, delivery and management of associated people structures.

At Wipro, Praveen handles two practices - Modern Microsoft Applications and Application Remediation and GTM for .NET and BizTalk business. In his current role, he has pioneered a productized solution that addresses all transformation requirements across Microsoft technologies (SharePoint, BizTalk, Dynamics, and Azure). He has also been instrumental in driving key top-25 accounts as part of his practice management responsibilities.