A case for Quality

WHENEVER an event of earth-shattering consequence occurs, there is a tendency
to ask: "Where were you at the time it happened?" Americans normally
recall where they were when John Kennedy was gunned down and Indians inevitablly
remember where they were when Indira Gandhi was shot dead.

As for me, here I was entertaining two US clients in Pune when we heard news
of the WTC attack. As the evening progressed, there was a transition from
disbelief to shock to relief as our guests discovered that their family members,
one of whom actually worked near the Pentagon and the other in the heart of the
WTC, were safe. A few days later, at a weekend in the tea gardens of Munnar, I
was amazed to find that there was very little awareness of the tragedy among
many of the plantation workers in that idyllic part of the world. But almost
everybody had heard of computers and some even had a son or nephew doing a
computer course and working towards the great international dream!

The lesson it taught me was that even in times of great worldly concerns, the
show does and must go on. We must seek lessons from adversities and build new
opportunities.

Lessons to be learnt

The first, of course, which every company CEO, professional and industry
analyst is discovering is that we are clearly in uncharted waters and the
immediate future is difficult, if not impossible to predict. The second is that
while the intelligentsia is agonizing over likely scenarios for international
relations, international business and the world community at large, the vast
pool of citizenry, at least in countries like India is blissfully unaware of the
magnitude of the event or its ramifications, having survived many droughts and
floods and earthquakes which have wrought even greater havoc in their more
immediate surroundings. And last, there is still optimism about the future, to
be tapped and strengthened as the world continues to fight the old battles–against
literacy and poverty!

The information technology sector in India will of course be affected, first
by the ongoing slowdown and the recession that have now been precipitated by the
tragedy and also by the added reasons–geographic proximity to the battle
ground and patriotism towards local providers, that will weigh on CIO minds in
their considerations of outsourcing. But these are transient phenomena, which a
strong and sustained quality response can and should overcome as the industry
picks up the threads with its clients. This is the challenge that industry
chieftains and policy planners alike must successfully take up in rebuilding the
confidence to address the ‘IT is India’s Tomorrow’ dream.

Industry imperatives–quality rules!

In a situation where low-cost options from Ireland, Hungary, China and
Philippines will become even more attractive to global CIOs, the Indian
advantage has to be quality–in products, services and every professional who
now waves the India IT flag. In the software sector, with new SEI CMM level 5
companies coming to the fore every week, the time has come to win the war
against emerging competition through high-quality processes and better quality
people. In a market flush with opportunities, it has been all too easy to take
90% quality as sufficient and this could well be the time for software
engineering process practitioners and quality evangelists to come down hard on
errant programmers and project managers and get 100% levels of quality in all
their spheres of influence.

There is no better place to implement quality than in the domestic sector.
Successful software exporters have been staying away from the domestic market,
complaining about the lack of client awareness, difficulty in getting signoffs
and the perpetual need to write off the last 10% when the client refused to let
the project finish gracefully. Most CEOs will agree that there has always been a
lackadaisical attitude towards resources deployed on projects at home. This has
led to clients responding less than professionally. This might be the
opportunity to significantly improve quality in every software project, be it
for export or domestic purpose. Perhaps, the industry segment most in need of an
overhaul is computer education.

While the slowdown in computer education has had one welcome effect of
getting the fly-by-night operators of small undifferentiated training centers to
shut shop and flee in search of greener pastures, giants like Aptech, NIIT and
SSI have also felt the heat. With one look at the financial analysts, the set of
responses have been….

• To cut down on advertising and resort to more local direct marketing
  efforts.

• To sign up more franchisees in an attempt to improve the
  return on capital employed in the business.

• To focus on international expansion while the slowdown
  continues on Indian shores.

While all this may have a palliative effect on short-term
performance, there can be no getting away from the need to improve system
quality. As less students pass through the portal of computer training
institutes, it would be a good idea to focus on the learning process and
revitalize the curriculum to ensure conceptual learning rather than package
skills. Course designers in corporate offices of training companies should look
at this lull as an opportunity to effectively integrate distance learning
technologies into the training material to ensure that course delivery becomes
as faculty-independent as possible. A number of redundant software professionals
may now find it worth their while to take a one- or two-year training
sabbatical, so this may be the right time to significantly improve the quality
of manpower at training institutes across the country.

Ganesh Natarajan
is deputy chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies and the global CEO of Zensar