Paying heed to what Ginni Rometty said

Last week IBM's chief Ginni Rometty was in India, and among other things what she said were that India needs to understand the difference between consumer data and business data while making regulations; legislators need to be educated, and that skills are more important than degrees. Let us have a look at each of them and try to analyse them.

India currently is in the process of making regulations for data protection and there are strong voices globally to have servers located on a country's soil itself so that the data can ultimately remain within sovereign boundaries, particularly because of protectionist tendencies in the United States, Europe, and followed in the rest of the world. China has been following this policy for a very long time and the best of the American companies have, willy-nilly, complied with the Chinese diktat.

To a certain extent it is true that ultimately having the servers within one's jurisdiction makes things a little easier as far as legal procedures and physically moving one tangible property to another place are concerned, however, with newer methods of data exchange, it is not at all foolproof for data protection. There's no doubt that consumer data is something private and protected by the law in most of the evolved jurisdictions as a fundamental right. It relates to the privacy of an individual more than the business data about a consumer – behaviour of a consumer in selecting and buying products and services. Business data is typically exchanged between marketing companies for a price.

The difference between these two types of data is, however, not absolutely clear cut and often there are overlaps. There have been very serious issues about data breach by Equifax, Target, Cambridge Analytica – just to name a few companies and incidents, and these breaches have taken place in highly developed countries with a well-developed legal framework like the US, the UK, Singapore, etc. It is, therefore, not the case that business data should be freely transferable – as Rometty stated – between continents. There are possibilities when the privacy and business data are intertwined and separating them becomes impossible.

The legislators undoubtedly need to be educated, not only in India but in the US and other developed countries also. Most of the laws are not eventually made by the legislators, but well-trained and experienced members in drafting committees do that. The legislative bodies typically deliberate on the basic principles and make certain policy decisions. Thereafter, fleshing them out is done by the legal draftsmen, and the executive under the power of delegated legislation. Very often, things get complicated as this old gem tells us:

"I'm the parliamentary draftsman; I compose the country's laws, and of half the litigation; I'm undoubtedly the cause."

So, practically, it is not the legislators who need to be educated but mainly the draftsman must be mandated to keep things simple and effective. Whether we like it or not, a large number of our graduates, especially science and engineering graduates, are unemployable. Well, it is argued at times that the purpose of education is not simply to get a job, but it is the training of mind and it is grooming a person. That all sounds good. In the real world, there is hardly any person who would study engineering just for sheer fun and not to earn a livelihood, whether by working somewhere or starting a venture of his own. Similar is the case with science graduates, though some of them may go in blue skies research – basic research without any immediate application – which itself is a very important job. Until and unless a science graduate is really bright and sharp, and armed with the basic degree, he is not going to get entry into a research institution. So, if skills are important, degrees also do matter.

What Rometty has said is not earth-shattering, however, worth pondering over.

The author is a professor at IIM-A, akagarwal@iima.ac.in