Winds Of Change

IT has come a long

way in India since the time in the late seventies and even through the

eighties, when one had to take off one's shoes and step into a freezing

glass-walled chamber to pay homage to the whirring tapes of the IT God!

Today, kids in the major metros are using computers to do their school

projects, retired old men surf the internet and even government babus

are feeling the winds of IT change sweeping through their departments.

And if you are in Andhra Pradesh, it is a veritable gale of technology

that is sweeping away the remnants of bygone inefficiency and bringing

in a new progressive era of e-governance.






This progression in the role of IT was predicted by Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) in the late eighties. In its landmark 'Management

in the Nineties' research program, MIT traced the progress of IT through

the various evolutionary stages of localized exploitation in departments

and functions, through the internal integration of these functions within

organizations to business process reengineering, to make the organization

in itself more focused toward the needs of its customers and shareholders.

The institute had also predicted that the nineties would see the beginning

of the revolutionary stages of business network redesign and even business

scope redefinition. In today's context, where the ubiquitous internet

and the spread of ecommerce has put IT on the radar screen of every

corporate strategist and marketeer, this prediction is proving to be

accurate.






More than a support function


Corporations, which have slowly begun to embrace ERP as a means to true
integration, will see the virtue of a comprehensive supply chain optimization

strategy, where ERP implementation will be linked with web-enabled business

systems throughout the organization, with business-to-business and business-to-consumer

interfaces to link the virtual corp to its external customers and all

stakeholders.






IT is becoming the cornerstone of every business process and is moving
from a support to a truly transformational role, enabling new business

opportunities to develop on a regular basis. As more and more corporations

embrace supply chain optimization through end-to-end implementation

of ERP and groupware solutions, a new era of collaborative reconfiguration

will emerge where yesterday's competitors will become collaborators

and suppliers and customers will work together in a win-win environment,

joined at the hip by enabling technologies.






A logical corollary of this emerging revolution is the emergence of
an 'information society' with knowledge workers commanding the highest

premium in all communities and societies. Most corporations have recognized

the imperative to make the transition from data to information to knowledge,

and in the next few years, more and more technologies will be deployed

to make acquisition, storage and dissemination of knowledge a regular

feature of the information architecture of every progressive firm. Groupware

technologies, collaborative working and business intelligence tools

will make one more prediction, that of the 'informated organization'

made by Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard in her book 'In the Age of the Smart

Machine', a reality of the new millennium. The 'knowledge corp' can

even be extended to 'knowledge states,' where comprehensive information

and skills can be spread over many miles to reach every corner and every

citizen. Schools, colleges, corporations and even homes and communities

can have access to knowledge-on-tap and ecommerce tools can enable citizens

to have access on free or commercial basis to all forms of enabling

information.






What does the future hold for IT and its role in the new millennium?
As IT pervades all forms of human endeavor, from education to information

to entertainment to working methods and work processes, crossware technologies,

involving the interface of internet, multimedia and traditional software,

will enable seamless communication between appliances, shop floor machinery

and computing equipment of all types to enable free flow of information

and knowledge across homes, offices, societies and countries. While

it is arguable whether true wisdom can be harnessed through further

developments in IT, many more new developments can surely be expected

in the 'knowledge societies' that will characterize the countries of

the new millennium.






Ganesh Natarajan,


MD, Aptech Ltd, and


Director, Hexaware Group.


ganeshn@aptech.ac.in

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