Modernisation of public sector, public-private partnership: Satya Nadella on post-COVID recovery

Modernisation of the public sector through the use of technology and public-private partnership will be crucial to the recovery post coronavirus, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The CEO said that these two factors would be crucial for the catch-up growth in the next 10 years, said Nadella at the 93rd Annual General Meeting of industry body FICCI.

The Microsoft chief commended India on the development in technology. “Some of the work that’s happening in India, whether it is the ID system or the banking APIs or the payment API, it’s pretty enlightening,” said Nadella.

He added that India is seen as a case study of some real profound change driven across both private and public sectors. Nadella said that the primary focus should be to ensure that the public sector is being supported in modernisation and the public-private partnership is helping adopt all the changes and bring more ubiquity to that change.

“I think it’s absolutely possible in the next 10 years, catch up growth is possible when both the public institutions and the private sector, both in tandem are able to move at it, and move rapidly,” said Nadella.
The Microsoft chief said that given his family background, he thinks a lot about the role of the public sector. Born in Hyderabad, Nadella’s father was a civil servant in India. He said that he often thinks of the necessary conditions to be able to deal with the current complexity.

Nadella said that there is a rather big opportunity in 2020 to create technology that every organisation can use. “It’s not about celebrating our own tech. It’s about tools for other people to be able to create more tech and that gives a real direction to what we are trying to get done,” he said.

He emphasised on the role of technology on tiding over the constraints to allow businesses function. “This has been the time where digital tech is being adopted at scale… There’s not going to be a single boardroom, where they’re not going to talk about digital technology as something that is nice to have rather it’s going to be core, not just for their future transformation, but for their business continuity so that’s perhaps the biggest structural change that I see.” BusinessToday