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Event
Technology Sabha ‘07
The second edition of Technology Sabha once again put the
spotlight on e-governance initiatives and acted as a forum for government officials
to share ideas and experiences
Immense growth in IT and need for automation to provide better
and speedy services to citizens has led to an e-governance wave in the country.
Every single government body is turning to IT in order to keep itself up-to-date
with technology. The government has to serve every citizen without discrimination
which is one of the biggest challenges for it. Their applications and services
should be such that every individual can use them with the same ease. In order
to guide them towards simple and effective solutions and options available,
to share the success stories and to exchange thoughts on how to go about managing
such an important task, the Indian Express Group hosted the second edition of
Technology Sabha in Goa. The event hosted key government IT leaders, technology
solution experts and consultants for three days.
Panel discussion on ‘Fail to plan & plan to fail’ |
Opening day
The event was inaugurated in the presence of JP Singh, chief secretary, Government
of Goa, Sandeep Khosla, Head-BPD, Indian Express group and V R Srivatsan, vice
president of Business Objects South Asia. Immediately after lighting the lamp,
Singh gave his perspective of e-governance and congratulated the Indian Express
group for hosting the event. Talking about the usage of IT in e-governance,
he said, “This e-governance wave is an indication of the fact that IT is
one of the prime engines which will take the country forward.” He felt
that such initiatives provide tremendous growth in terms of better solutions
to problems and bring about transparency in government functions and processes.
He further talked about successful IT projects handled by the government of
Goa and showed his desire to lay 200 Mbps of connectivity in the state which
would make it possible for every single house in Goa to run a BPO. He added,
“We are looking to satisfy the citizen of Goa and want to lay a foundation
for growth by providing various services.” There is a strong wave of hope
that the new government in Goa will support all these IT initiatives for better
governance.
This introductory speech was followed by a presentation on
BI—a promise of innovation, value and results for government by SAS. This
session explained how the right use of data and its analysis can add value to
the decision making process of any vertical and in particular government organisations
who are burdened with many other difficulties which corporate India does not
have to tackle. “The government has to handle the largest customer base
which no other vertical can carry which ranges from new born babies to ageing
citizens. They do not have the liberty to choose their customer base and have
a unique non profit business model which is a difficult task in itself,”
said Ashit Panjwani, Director – Marketing, SAS India. The data compiled
on so many citizens is massive and ever increasing which has to be taken care
of in a smart manner for smarter decisions. He gave five levels of handling
data in the right manner and predictions from the same. Business Intelligence
has to be seen as much more than only reporting which is the most common mistake
in the corporate world.
Day Two
V R Srivatsan, vice president of Business Objects South Asia made a presentation
about the ‘Seven habits of highly effective e-governments’. He cited
a slew of statistics to bolster the point that most organisations come up short
when it comes to aligning employees with strategy. Holding individuals responsible
for their performance and sorting out the issues that arise is hard in a service
organisation. One way out is to implement a closed loop performance management
system where performance is measured, adjustments made and future plans laid
in. The life event model was discussed wherein you look at life events conceptually
and temporally. Citizen centricity was touted as the panacea for e-governance
projects. Last but not least, the importance of having trustworthy information
as a basis for decision making was highlighted. All too often we end up making
bad decisions on the basis of bad data. Finally, Srivatsan talked about BI 2.0
and how the technology had evolved on all fronts—user, platform, network,
application and community.
Prakash Advani, Linux Practice Head, Novell India gave a presentation about
the advantages of Linux vis-a-vis Windows and UNIX. He also spoke about security
and how most attacks on a network take place at the application layer and the
gap between a loophole being announced and a patch being applied. Advani also
gave a demo of the SUSE Linux Enterprise desktop where he showed the multi-tasking,
graphical and multimedia capabilities of the OS. The audience had several queries
and when asked how SUSE stacked up against the competition, Advani said, “We
have flat pricing up to 32 CPUs of any CPU family. We do not charge for additional
cores or virtual machines. Nor do we charge for clustering and application security.”
Sunil Chandiramani, Partner, Ernst & Young talked about the ‘Future
promise of e-governance’. He started off with a quick recap of where India
is today and then moved on to address what needs to be done. A national citizen
ID database is the need of the hour. Today there are hundreds of citizen IDs.
Chandiramani said that there were two projects afoot to create a unique national
ID. One is being undertaken by the Ministry of Home Affairs which is doing a
pilot with two million cards. The other is an attempt to create a unique ID
number for every citizen based on said citizen’s driving license or election
card. He said, “Several countries already have a unique citizen ID. We
need to build applications with the hope that we will have one single ID number.”
He also talked about lacunae that exist such as the lack of replication of successful
projects, inadequate rural connectivity and too many data centres being set
up. While most e-governance projects revolve around transactions, this has to
change and we have to look beyond transactions as the be all and end all.
Then it was time to take a look at next generation converged networks. This
session had a futuristic approach to the networking scenario in India. We have
already moved from basic connectivity in early nineties to the personal broadband
boom of 2006. It is time to look beyond all this in the age of hyperconnectivity
in which anything that can be connected to the network will be connected, encompassing
person-to-person communication, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine. Today,
every network and communication service is treated as a separate entity but
in the future all of these will be converged to a single network through protocols
such as SIP. “The SIP protocol has the power to create a revolution in
the same way that HTTP did a few years back. This will bring virtual enterprise
convergence in effect in which everything and anything can be accessed from
anywhere using any device. There will be a single access point and the rest
of the network will go in the back end and converge,” said Ravinder Singh,
Business Head - Government, Nortel. He further elaborated on 4G, Carrier Ethernet/PBT
and Unified Communications for next generation networks.
This session was followed by one about the ground reality of application development
in government enterprises and what needs to be done. The presentation was about
application delivery infrastructure for government enterprises. This gave an
insight into one of the most common problems faced by CIOs, which is access.
Every single application in any organisation needs an access strategy. “An
application delivery infrastructure (ADI) can simplify and consolidate the entire
network and this will prove a better approach to centralising all the applications;
be it legacy applications or new ones,” said Seemant Chaudhry, National
SI Manager, Citrix. He further stated some of the advantages of access infrastructure
such as smart access, smooth roaming, end-to-end visibility, robust and resilient
foundation, as well as a secure by design architecture.
Patrice Perche, Vice President Southern Europe & Middle East India, Fortinet
made a presentation about ‘Dirty Money on the wires - The Business Model
of Cyber Criminals’.
He stressed that reported offenses are just the tip of the iceberg. The FBI
reported $67 billion in damages last year (US) while the NHTCU reported £2.45
billion (UK). Credit card fraud alone costs $400 million per year. Perche delved
into the business model of cyber crime and talked about various types of cyber
crime—spamming, carding, phishing, herding and industrial spying—and
how they pay off. He discussed the various kinds of cyber criminals— skilled
Coders, Kids who form the workforce, the Mob who are the puppet masters and
the Drops who act as the mules. The marketplace here is IRC and the currency
e-gold. After discussing the intricacies of existing cyber crime, he went on
to talk about an emerging threat, that of mobile phone diallers. He concluded
with trends in the security space, the evolution of threats and where UTM scores
on the security front.
After this expose of the underbelly of the Net, it was time for some fundamentals
about project management. According to Gartner, 51 percent of the projects overshoot
the budget by 189 percent while achieving only 74 percent of the stated objective.
Such a statistic certainly calls for an expert opinion on project management.
“Looking at the typical project outcomes, almost 20 percent fail to realise
the objective itself and apart from that some projects fail due to technical
incompatibility and some due to loss of sponsors,” said Guru Malladi, Partner,
Ernst & Young. He added, “With people, everything changes, this calls
for another sort of attrition in the government sector. The continuous movement
of officials from one department to another is one of the major concerns for
government projects and we have to make a model to handle this and provide greater
continuity.” As part of the remedies of such problems he emphasised on
the need to monitor things continuously and to have a method for dealing with
projects. According to him a successful project begins with a project monitoring
office.
V H Buch, Additional secretary, Dept. of Science & Technology, Government
of Gujarat gave a talk about Gujarat’s experience in deploying a state
WAN. The infrastructure in Gujarat consists of 4 Mbps links to the district
and further 2 Mbps links to the talukas from the district and finally wireless
connectivity at the village level. 225 talukas are connected to 25 district
headquarters using 2 Mbps leased circuits. All of this facilitates uninterrupted
and easy IP based Video-conferencing between various government offices. Buch
listed some of the criteria for service availability, viz., assured end-to-end
connectivity, security policy in place, the core team consisting of departmental
CIOs in place for day to day coordination with the SWAN operator and SLAs with
all vendors. Future plans include setting up a 10,000 sq feet data centre, setting
up clusters depending upon the network load, extending video conferencing up
to the taluka level and setting up data centres at various cluster locations.
From the West, we looked at the north Indian experience with
IT implementation. Uttaranchal has many e-Governance projects under its belt
which has made governance simpler. “We believe in providing services to
the citizens right at their doorstep which makes governance more efficient and
cost-effective,” said Jayant Sinha, DGM & Head (IT), UPCL. Before implementing
a project the Uttaranchal government re-engineered processes and even did some
amount of rationalisation in order to identify the service model that needed
to be delivered. Governance needs to be smart viz.
Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent. Sinha
talked in detail about some projects such as the Centralised Utility Approval
System and Unified Payment & Complaint Management. e-Governance is about
giving all sorts of services to citizens and not only information.
Day Three
The third day of the Technology Sabha saw case studies and experiences forming
the topic of discussion amongst the delegates and technology providers. The
last day of the event kicked off with an interesting and innovative implementation
in the small town of Baramati and the villages surrounding it. “Our vision
is to bring IT to common man in rural India and our mission is to connect rural
India with the rest of the country,” explained Dr. Amol Goje, Director,
VIIT, Baramati. With the help of various initiatives, VIIT is training 6,351
students. He explained the working of their innovative mobile computer van project
which runs across Baramati and its surrounding areas and covers about two to
three schools a day. The project provides 60 hours of computer training to each
student in a year. Apart from this, he gave a brief of some other projects such
as WiMAX implementation for 250 machines in the university, FM community radio
and many more.
Arun Ramachandran – Head, Presales, Sybase talked about creating an information
edge. His assertion was that the unwired enterprise achieves an information
edge. There are three stages in this process—to optimise applications,
server platforms and databases; link all these and finally to extend this linked
information to any device at any location regardless of the kind of connectivity
available. He went on to cite cases of Sybase clients in India and the projects
that they had implemented successfully starting with the tale of how Indian
Overseas Bank used Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) to quickly transition
to a new core banking environment with 750 branches. He also talked about CRIS’
Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) that is available 24x7, synchronizes information
across zones and provides reporting for a view into operating results in real-time
all the while handling volumes of over 100,000 tickets per day. These were but
two of many more.
‘Protecting the taxpayers investments, tailored business-critical
continuity solution for government institutions’ was the title of the presentation
made by Prashant Bhatia, Head – Shared Services & Application Engineering,
Emerson Network Power (India) Pvt. Ltd. He talked about how the networked economy
is leading to new challenges for IT and a demand for more power, circuits and
cables leading infallibly to more heat being generated. “What you need
is to achieve high availability with end-to-end grid-to-chip solution to protect
your critical IT Infrastructure,” he said. Bhatia talked about the kinds
of data centres—type I to IV where I is the basic server room and IV is
a data centre with redundancy at every point. Most Indian data centres are between
levels II and III. RBI has a data centre that is at III+, there is no redundant
power. He concluded by talking about Emerson’s cooling and management products.
To bring together a wide swath of experience from the government
a Panel Discussion was held. This discussion was moderated by Dr. Krishnamurthy
Subramanian, Deputy Director General, NIC & IT Advisor to CAG of India.
The members of the panel included Vagmin H Buch, Additional Secretary - Dept.
of Science & Technology, Government of Gujarat; Vishal Kumar Dev, Director
IT & Ex-Officio Additional Secretary – Department of IT, Government
of Orissa; Siddharth, Secretary to Government, Government of West Bengal and
Amod Kumar, Special Secretary – IT, Government of Uttar Pradesh. The topic
of discussion was chosen by all members of the panel and it was ‘Fail to
plan & plan to fail.’ Each member of the panel talked about his own
state’s successes and failures and the reasons behind the same. This discussion
got active participation from the audience which made it all the more interesting
and informative.
This interactive panel discussion was followed by a special presentation on
the national e-governance plan and some of the things to be considered while
dealing with projects so as to ensure their success. “E-governance projects
are about delivery; in a manner conducive to citizens. While dealing with such
projects, business process re-engineering is really important along with change
management,” said SP Singh, Senior Director, Ministry of Communications
& IT, Government of India (GoI). He talked about the status of various e-governance
initiatives undertaken by GoI. He wanted all the state government to have their
own data centres. GoI plans to roll out operations for 35 data centres mostly
in the state capitals at an expenditure of Rs. 12,700 crores. All this infrastructure
is expected to be in place by the end of 2008.
Next up was a session on one of the biggest concerns of IT professionals—security.
‘Security optimisation – Integrated Vulnerability Management’
presentation by PatchLink covered the phenomenon of dealing with known risks
in an organisation and how neglecting these can have a profound effect on any
organisation, be it government or corporate. “Whenever we connect two machines
we are opening ourselves up to risk. The way the number of threats is growing
it is becoming more and more difficult to deal with them and at the same time
the time available to respond to these risks is going down. We need to find
these threats and patch them as soon as possible,” said Andrew Clarke,
Senior VP – International, Patchlink Corporation. Patching is required
to comply with various standards floating around the world.
R Sri Kumar, DGP and Chairman and Managing Director, Karnataka State Police
Housing Corporation (KSPHC) made a presentation about project management drawing
from the experience of his own organisation which leveraged this technology
to turn its business around and grow robustly. If the proof of the pudding is
in the eating, the numbers tell a convincing tale. KSPHC was on the verge being
closed when it rebounded using project management to good effect. “We had
to change, get more projects and become more accountable to the public,”
said Sri Kumar. The change came about due to EPM. It helped the organisation
move from doing construction only for the police, home guard, prisons and fire
forces to where it takes up any infrastructure, e-governance or e-commerce project.
Punning on the PPP concept, he said, “My PPP model is policing of the publicly
funded projects.”
Making the transition from traditional governance to e-governance is a big hurdle
for everybody involved in the process. Be in government bodies or private companies,
all the players have to deal with changes happening in various forms. For government
organisations it is a much bigger concern owing to continuous transfer of the
people involved and changing project requirements. “Not everything can
be planned; we have to find a process which supports both the organisations
and the individuals concerned and the change which can actually fit the desired
direction of the project,” said NS Rajan, National Head – HR, Ernst
& Young. Issues related to change management and the reasons why one cannot
handle change efficiently were discussed. Poor programming management; uncertainty,
fear and anxiety; lack of employee motivation were some of the reasons for project
failures due to change. He suggested solutions for each of these. Listeners
were urged to adopt a holistic model for change management without which a project
is difficult to sustain for its lifecycle.
Before bringing the curtains down on the Technology Sabha 2007, the Karnataka
Police demonstrated its IT strength. “We have computerised each and every
police office and have a minimum of a Pentium 4 PC in every police station.
Officers who were keen on learning and had some amount of understanding of technology
have been trained professionally,” said SK Balarama, Inspector General
of Police, Karnataka State Police, State Crime Records Bureau. Police stations
are connected to district offices. Software has been deployed for various purposes
such as office automation and unified messaging. This sort of demonstration
gives motivation to other police departments to take the IT way for better control.
With that Technology Sabha 2007 came to an end. It was an event filled with
informative sessions and experiences which were complemented by sightseeing
tours and cruise rides in Goa.
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