New Delhi, March 12 2008
e-Governance - past and present
Being large, bureaucratic and mostly focused towards the common man, the Government has always been an important, illusive but a very lucrative market for the IT industry. Having said this, the stakeholders and decision makers of IT adoption among the government believe that time has come for registering the next wave of growth in IT adoption.
The main objective of the MPower event was to focus on IT deployment challenges that are unique to the Government, bringing together a select group of IT implementers to share their experiences and challenges.
The event was moderated by S Subramanian, DDG (NIC) Ministry of Comm & IT and IT advisor to the CAG of India. He raised a couple of contemporary issues regarding upscaling the quality of service delivery to the common man and role of technology in it. “E-Governance projects need to be supplemented with organizational changes, business process re-structuring issues and inter-organizational issues.”
While addressing some of the e-Governance success stories, Subramanian said, “We have to be adaptive enough for standards in interoperability and integrity. Implementation has to come through committed dleadership and a balance between bureaucracy and policy. We need to work on the aspect of giving services to the citizens from now on,” he said.
Considering the emphasis given to e-Governance projects, the trend also states that sustainable and affordable solutions are required for growth that e-Government stakeholders are looking at. Dhrupad Mathur, senior consultant, National e-Governance Plan, Ministry of Communications & IT, Govt. of India quoted, “With the objective of giving priority to people, we need to nurture leadership for business administration to be achieved by motivating entrepreneurs.”
Kuldip Bajwa, general manager IT of Punjab National Bank, gave a perspective of the banking organization and role of technology in its growth. He said, “50 percent of our total population does not have any bank account, which is a huge opportunity for our organization.”
Untapped challenges
While giving a different perspective of a technology company, Rajesh Janey of EMC added, “Undoubtedly we have come a long way. At this point of time, momentum has built up, and acceptance will be at a faster pace. Maintaining and ensuring the security of information is one area that we need to emphasize on. If we are carrying valuable citizen data, then it becomes an important aspect to assure them about the security of their data.”
It is well understood that processes, people, technology and resources are the four pillars of e-Governance. Adding to this, Subramanian said, “There are many lessons learnt so far. All these four elements are critical areas in the success or failure of any project. Time has come that we need to carefully examine our past, analyze our success and move forward for delivering better services.”
Bangalore, March 13 2008
Leveraging IT/ITES best practices to accelerate innovation
At the MPower event in Ban galore on March 13, Aztecsoft CIO N. Nataraj, who moderated the discussion, remarked that although economic trends in the US were causing worry among Indian outsourcing providers, there was already enough market available to go through a recessionary period. Pointing to just one piece of the market, he said, ‘‘Some 200-300 billion lines of code still reside on mainframes. These have to be brought to the Web era. That by itself is a $120-150 billion market out there’’.
Nataraj cautioned, however, that outsourcing providers could not afford to continue a business-as-usual approach in the face of a rising rupee, rising salaries and attrition. ‘‘We used to consider employee utilisation rate of 75 percent as enough. Now we need 85 percent utilisation.
Going Green might actually help cut down operational costs, Nataraj said. ‘‘Older technology is a hidden cost. For instance, the change from CRT monitors to TFT displays facilitated the shift to lower capacity transformer and diesel generator sets reducing costs.”
Suresh Hosakoppal, Senior Director, Production Operations, Yahoo India, picked on the idea of ‘best practices’ and wondered whether one set works for everyone. He opined that the fundamental task of IT departments was to ‘‘use technology to get the right information to the right people at the right time’’. But even the way this was sought to be done was evolving, especially as the costs of doing so had risen while the promise of technology had not been delivered on. ‘‘Years ago, we just wanted to put the infrastructure together and get going. Now, we are looking at making that infrastructure efficient’’.
Speaking about the difficulties that IT departments faced, Karupasamy, CIO, 24/7Customer.com, said IT vendors continued to expect to make high margins on their products.
While adding that getting skilled people was the other big pain point for IT organisations, he complained bitterly about the lack of professionalism in the workplace. ‘‘Time spent on non-productive activities is very high giving way to politicking.’’
Karupasamy suggested that there were a few ways to beat the downturn blues and encourage innovation. ‘‘We can turn IT teams outward and offer ITSM to customers and thus open up a new revenue stream for the company.’’
One way to ensure management buy-in for IT innovation was to put the budgets for initiatives in the business’s court. The same went for Green IT, Karupasamy said. ‘‘Green is good, but ensure that it is part of the enterprise budget, not IT budget’’.
N. Gajapathy, Senior VP and CIO, Asia, Transworks, focused on the attrition issue and suggested that, doing documentation in a way that makes it people-independent will ensure that attrition does not cause problems. He also identified IT costs as a major issue and said that the future lies in virtualisation and consolidation.
Nataraj concluded the evening by remarking that typically business value comes from only 8-10 percent of the total IT budget. ‘‘Business value can increase only if you reduce the time given to operations, and increase the time given to innovation.’’ He also suggested that the top leaders in IT organisations should focus on value-creation rather than technology per se.
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