Back to the Future

One

of the most intriguing cartoons that her-alded the arrival of the new millennium

was by RK Lakshman in The Times of India. He showed the Year 2000 as an old man

trooping out of the frame and the Year 2001 as an even older man coming in

wearily into the scene. How true this prediction is. We may be in a New Year and

at the dawn of a new millennium, but the issues facing us are significantly more

daunting than they were in early 2000.

We have a menu of woes to choose from. A poor domestic economy, now further

slammed by a devastating earthquake. A slowdown in domestic hardware sales. A

veritable war for talent being fought in the human resource departments of IT

firms across the country and the unpredictable scenarios that may result from a

slowing down of the US economy. A recent Morgan Stanley Dean Witter survey of

150 American CIOs showed that the growth in IT spending was likely to be at

least a third less than the growth in 2000. While many CIOs said that

outsourcing was the answer to the challenges that shrinking budgets would

create, a majority also felt that they would take the safe route of working

through the Andersens and IBMs of the world, rather than experiment with new

vendors in an uncertain scenario.

India’s software chieftains are taking heart from the continuing flow of

offshore project business from overseas clients. And there’s the expectation

that a strong economy in the UK and many parts of Western Europe would mitigate

the impact of the expected "soft landing" of the US Economy. But there’s

no doubt that it will take very clear focus and aggressive marketing to sustain

and grow medium-size software companies in this year. They would need to rely a

lot less on "staffing services" and far more on technology development

through partnering with Fortune 500 technology majors. And through reliable

e-commerce offerings developed for large, medium and small clients, with

commercial flexibility in providing the solution. Completely-paid for projects,

IP licensing, and hosting through an ASP model, are all opportunities to be

explored.

Solutions 2001

The major opportunities emerging still seem to be in partnering with CIOs,

not just in the US and Europe but also in Asia and even in India, to build the

"digital nervous system" that Bill Gates had talked about back in

1999. It is interesting to study some of the rules for succeeding in the digital

age that Gates had mentioned in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought, and

see how recent events have shaped their relevance to the needs of the millennium

corporation:

• Use e-mail extensively

• Capture sales data online, at
  
  source

• Turn passive data into active
  
  information

• Build virtual teams through
  
  digital tools

• Route customer complaints
  
  immediately

• Redefine organization boundaries
  
  using digital communication

• Eliminate the middlemen

• Help customers solve their own
  
  problems.

The first imperative is that of using e-mail. It is amusing to note that even

in the US, a study has shown that while over 70 percent of CEOs use e-mail, 18

percent are still used to secretary-assisted e-mail, while over 10 percent are

still e-mail-phobic. Corporate India, with even non-IT chiefs like Anand

Mahindra and Harsh Goenka tapping away merrily on their keyboards, is not

lagging in that respect at least.

However, there is still a lack of appreciation of the fact

that e-mail proliferation is just the tip of the iceberg, and cannot be a

substitute for a full-blown knowledge management system within the organization.

E-mail enables collaboration but does not facilitate acquisition, storage,

dissemination and the use of explicit and tacit knowledge–about employees,

shareholders, partners and customers across the organization.

Knowledge exchange needs both technology and culture. One

cannot be a substitute for the other. The other is the willingness to share

knowledge and make the processes of the organization less dependant on the

individual brilliance of one or few persons. Intelligent deployment of groupware

and collaborative computing tools like Exchange and Notes are also a great

supplement to enterprise knowledge portals. But they will be effective only if

collaboration is seen as a cultural necessity rather than merely a technological

possibility.

Linking to partners and customers

A truly successful modern-day organization does not limit its

sphere of influence to its internal employees or to its physical

brick-and-mortar confines. The enterprise knowledge portal may well be the heart

that pumps energy through the organization, but the digital nervous system has

to extend to every supplier, subcontractor, dealer and distributor. The tactile

sensory capability has to touch every present and future customer.

In its early days, supply chain management tended to be

positioned as an expensive Fortune 500 tool. But the advent of ASPs and low-cost

license tolls have made it easy for every organization to digitally link up all

value chain collaborators, and conduct every stage of the transaction through

the Internet. Maturing of public key infrastructure and digital signatures in

many countries has made e-commerce a reality–and more important, a

value-for-money reality available to the small and medium enterprise as well as

to the large corporation.

Customer delight too has become a technologically enabled

reality, not just for the Fedex, Cisco and Dell type organizations, but even for

young companies who have realized that there is more to the Internet than a

pretty Web site. Today, customers are able to access company data, get briefed

on new product releases, fire complaints as well as suggestions and have access

to e-CRM voice and internet support services to get clarifications and support

to a host of pre-sale queries and post-sale complaints.

This approach has also enabled a whole new culture of

self-service to emerge, both for information and for redressal of complaints,

providing convenience and time economies to the customer and company alike. And

with the integration capabilities that exist today between the Web interface and

traditional ERP or legacy systems, the whole organization is benefited by

grabbing customer data early in the purchase or service cycle.

Back to the future

The integration of the enterprise customer or market portals

and enterprise collaborative portals with enterprise knowledge portals and

information systems….this is the solutions architecture that many of us have

talked about, and many CEOs have only dreamed of. But there is no alternative.

Recently, when the celebrated physicist from Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, was in

Mumbai, I had the opportunity to interact with him through the communication

interface of his loquacious and intelligent wife. After listening carefully to

my views on the Indian software industry, Dr Hawking tapped out the message:

"The Internet will continue to transform every aspect". With many

erstwhile greats caught napping by the breathtaking U-turns in technology and

many young upstart companies competing for the future of the industry, Hawking

and Gates are both right. The future is happening in front of our eyes, and

every IT practitioner and user needs to accelerate to keep pace–or out of the

way.

Ganesh Natarajan is

managing director of Aptech Ltd and CEO of the Aptech Worldwide group of

companies