Can a Lady Speak ?

 

Once upon a time in there was an analytical platform called chankaya  to provide critical insight to business users , the massive platform had more than 25 business critical services hosted with thousands of dashboard providing real time as well as historical view . There were three leaders and respective teams supporting the ecosystem Brahma Kumar was responsible for all innovation from hardware to semantic layers , he ensured the internal machineries of system ran smoothly abstracting all the complexities from end users , he kept performing system upgrade bringing new and improved infrastructure as well as resolving old issues with system . He had two more counterparts , Vishnu Vardhan responsible for BAU activities of Chanakya who had teams of Application support consultants taking care of daily data load , front end and user issues . The teams of Brahma and Vishnu were highly technical and SMEs in their areas hence there was another small team present in ecosystem which was lead by Prakriti , Prakriti and her team under stood business context of system and report and they provided an interface between technical teams and Business users .

Business users looked up to prakriti for all communication and decision related Chanakya’s availability.  In 2016 Brahma suggested a major version upgrade to Chanakya’s database which was nearing end of life in few months . The business case was created and approved by needed stakeholders , Vishnu lined up his teams for all necessary support , testing , reschedules whereas Prakriti worked with business leaders to understand bets suited weekend where a downtime of 12 hours can be taken and system can be upgraded , the idea was to upgrade system on Saturday , ran needed loads on Sunday and let system be available on Monday for users to use . The D day arrived , by then all teams had rehearsed the plan and executed same in non production environments , there was good confidence that activity will be closed within time .

Chanakya was taken down , old data base backed up and restored into a newly built database environment , user permissions migrated and DNS names switched some of the initial tests were encouraging where technical teams could connect to data base and run query , see data . The ultimate litmus test was to trigger data loads , these data load jobs were veins of chankaya transporting the life blood – data to all the front end dashboards . Initial data loads refused to trigger from new data base , team assumed basic problems of access controls , job paths , source connection , firewall ports and checked one by one but none had shown any issue . Brahma and his team was already on the job from Saturday morning till Sunday morning , 12 hours past deadline of releasing the system , Vishnu was keeping close eye and his team was running all checks and supports both knew that a lot of effort has been spent on the project so far and it must get forward fixed to avoid restarting the exercise which will take months .

Prakriti on the other hand were worried that we have now crossed Sunday morning , a very thin window of running the data loads and making system available to business is left , if we continue fixing the issue , there will be chaos on Monday morning across multiple business functions . A checkpoint call was set up at 10:00 AM on Sunday to discuss next action items , when Prakriti joined Brahma was already updating on list of actions his teem took so far and he thought may be a full reboot of new data base and clearing the log once again could do the trick , the heated discussion on technicalities , steps involved went forward and backward between Brahma and Vishnu . After listening this for a while prakriti spoke – “can a lady speak”?

Call went silent which was broken by prakriti’s voice , “ A functional system even if old infrastructure is worth millions whereas a non functional system on upgraded infrastructure wont be of any value to us or business “  while I understand all of our effort in coming to this point but our commitment to business was to return a functional system on Monday which I am determined to do , we will need to revisit our approach and perform this upgrade in near future , I will make a case with business and get us another slot in next quarter by when our expert teams would have identified and fixed the issue .

Both Brahma and Vishnu could see the logic and agreed with heavy heart .

“can a leady speak ? “ still remains a key question in a cosmos where nature has inherently created balance with 50% women , this question had large social relevance , it took long time in many societies to let lady speak on key decisions and yet “can a lady speak ?” still remains a question in many of the developing societies .

Can a lady speak in matter of house hold finances, Can a lady speak in deciding future of her children in fact can a lady speak in deciding her own future ?

This inherent barrier has automatically crept into corporate world , in 21^st century it will be just to say it happens unintentionally and subconsciously unlike in previous centuries .

Ultimately lady will speak , woman will need to find her voice and speak assertively , some times it may need asking a dramatic question “can a lady speak?” but it should be a collective effort on all of us that no one needs to ask that question , we ourselves need to go around asking opinion from all those who missed out speaking , some times voices need enablement and support !.