Thushara Wijewardena: Delivering Strategic Consulting Services and Solutions Through Emerging Technologies & Practices

Aventude is a technology strategic consultation & solutions company, offering technology strategy and required innovation and R&D for enterprises and startups. It provides technical solutions for modern business problems, besides facilitating software development services through its extended engineering pool of passionate techies. 

Aventude's specialization is its expertise in handling business problems using technology in the end–to–end spectrum. Modern problems require diverse skills involving multiple tools to solve the challenges. This has made the technology landscape complex. It is widely accepted that technology is no more a tool, it is the driving force behind a businesses' success. In such context, from strategy to implementation,  businesses need a partner, to own whole or part of the value chain. Aventude is one such company that augments organizations and their thinking to successful implementation.  

Aventude's technology expertise and its research consists of pragmatic approaches, beyond buzzwords mainly in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Decentralized Computation (blockchain), Cloud & Edge and Security.  With active research presence in the AR/VR space.

Aventude has a global reach, providing its services internationally, across different business verticals. Currently, a majority its customers are from Europe. 

Visionary Leadership

Thushara is the Co-founder and CEO of Aventude. Fostering vision and growth, she has always drawn a line between the two, to propel the company grow.

Thushara started her career as a developer with a technical background, then moved to project and program management, and from there to various strategic roles of delivery and business development. With her valuable experience, she also held responsibilities from operational to board levels of corporates and non-profit national initiatives in the technology sector.

Thurupathan Vijayakumar, Co-founder of Aventude and Thushara worked together for a few years in the industry before starting Aventude. They both had a passion and hunger towards building something unique and different and wanted to start a technology service company that is futuristic, and can cater to the demands of the modern-day enterprise. They both saw that the old models practised in the industry were dying rapidly. In a quest to bring something new, they took the bold step to start Aventude.

Thushara says that she is privileged to cofound Aventude with someone like Thurupathan who is brilliant in technology understanding and business understanding alike. As she says Thurupathan is the Core Brain behind Aventude tech strategies. Thurupathan is the author of a few best-selling technology books and a truly inspirational young leader in the tech sector. Most of the times the duo brings different perspectives to the table but at the core, their values and goals are the same. That's the main reason why they see the results of what they do.

Valuable Leadership Learnings From the Best 

Thushara started her career very early just out of school. She studied while working which helped her to have an early head start compared to her peers. When Thushara thinks back, she can connect all the dots now. It was a blessing that she joined a small-scale software company with larger enterprise customers first instead of joining a very big structured company. Thushara's very first assignments with AirLiquide Asia and Pakistan Tobacco group made her independent, lead, respect differences and also explore and experience the Asian business culture very early in life.   

An innate passion to do things differently always helped her. She studied how agile and lean thinking could bring more value to distributed engineering teams, and started a blog to share her thoughts and experiences about it. This led her to build a very powerful network with PMI USA and also with the Agile Alliance.  Thushara considers herself lucky enough to be invited to feature PMI USA cover story and also to speak in many large international conferences, which gave her loads of exposure. When she joined another Scandinavian–owned Sri Lankan operation, it helped her to experience Scandinavian countries. Extensive travel also helped Thushara to build a great network in Europe and also to absorb values from all different cultures, collaborating with Innovations Norway, ICT Norway, WHO, UN and many other entities during some of her international engagements. Being involved in the public sector helped her to understand digital transformation initiatives from different angles. 

Another valuable experience was the opportunity she got to do her executive education at Harvard Business School. Learning corporate directorship at HBS was a game-changer. It was a powerhouse filled with many top women leaders from around the world. She still keeps her network alive which helps her a lot in various aspects of business. Besides, Thushara studied tech strategy and AI business impact from MIT Sloan. Thushara believes that learning from the best is always good.

Challenges to Conquer the Global Technology Language 

Thushara hasn't faced anything special that she can think of. She always has her family supporting her with everything she did. However, in the beginning, most people told her that if she stayed in Sri Lanka, it will be harder to build a career into the international level. But honestly, she did not find that as an impediment until now, her network and exposure overseas were always stronger than her exposure and network locally. Thushara has done many sessions conferences and won awards internationally. She strongly thinks that technology is a global language. "So, it doesn't matter where we are living physically, we anyway spend most our lives in cyberspace," she adds. 

Thushara considers being authentic, logical and empathetic as some of the vital attributes that every transformational leader should possess, in the global modern business.

Fuelling innovation with Futuristic Leadership

According to Thushara, when innovation is discussed, most of us feel fun & cool. But in reality, innovation can be exhausting, taxing and uncomfortable both emotionally and also intellectually. For a company to continuously innovate, it needs a very special type of leadership. This traditional leadership models that are learnt from the previous generation does not work anymore. This can be seen all around, why companies are lagging or derailing? For a company that is futuristic, leadership is not about setting vision and selling it to the rest.

Thushara further adds, "Today we have a very talented resource pool. To be ahead in the game, as leaders, we need to tap into every person's geniuses and bring such intelligence together to keep innovating. That is the biggest role of a modern leader and also the hardest thing to do".

Insights into the Future of Technology Services Industry

Thushara foresees a very good growth potential, and good traction leading the next wave of the technology services industry. She believes in measuring the KPIs not only by number but also by the impact made. The traditional workforce models are changing rapidly, and Aventude is continuing to use new resourcing models that work with the gig economy and other partnerships to access best talent from all over.

Thushara is of the opinion that the technology services industry has been constantly changing. The behavioural change is important to consider. Every organization is becoming a technology company. From a technical perspective, the future is about artificial intelligence and other visual technology elements. "We are at the bridge of bringing impactful solutions to the future, which is the real challenge," she concludes.

Fair Advice to Every Woman Leader

Thushara advises every budding and emerging woman leader that they should not expect anything to fall into the plate or to be positively discriminated just because they are women. She says, every budding and emerging woman leader must fight a fair game to win what they want. That's when they will truly become confident and content as a leader

She says, if you are given a choice between power or the talent, always move with the talent.