Books on the Backburner

Delivering the convocation address at the Symbiosis Centre for Information

Technology (SCIT) in Pune, I was struck by the qualitative improvement in the

young professionals now being prepared for global careers in information

technology. This batch would compare well with their peers from the IIMs and the

IITs. Some of them had already done original technology creation, a few had set

up their own companies and one graduate was already in the US building solutions

for American clients.

The Symbiosis center is unique in its approach to producing well-balanced

professionals with the right mix of business, technology and soft skills. The

emphasis is on learning and delivering solutions in addition to academics.

Through out the learning process, an attempt is made to bridge the gap between

academics and real-life business and industry requirements. There is an effort

to imbibe quality and standards right from the beginning. The SCIT Resource

Centre, a wing of SCIT, has also taken shape with an idea of developing

solutions for well-defined industry problems. So far, three major projects have

been delivered to organizations and there are others are at various stages of

development. After their first year of work under professional guidance,

students here go through the rigors of quality processes in coming up with the

final solution. The projects delivered so far are on ‘LDAP Server’, ‘Web-based

HR’, ‘Alice–a mini ERP for a Defense Unit’.

Another new generation training institution that displays the same clarity of

purpose is the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Bangalore led by

veteran Professor Sadagopan. And recently, a visit by Professor Srivathsan,

formerly with IIT Kanpur and now the director of the IIITM in Trivandrum was an

eye opener in the creative work that is being developed by academic institutions

in the new millennium.

And all this is not happening a minute too soon. Now that the clouds of

recession are being blown away by the winds of new technology spending, there is

no doubt that the $ 87 bn IT dream will not be met unless scores of institutions

like the three mentioned here emerge to fill the half million resource gap

expected to occur by the year 2008.

It’s not just software either! New institutions of excellence need to

emerge to train willing youngsters in microelectronics to develop the fledgling

hardware industry, bioinformatics to provide a new caliber of resource to the

budding biotech and bioinformatics segments and a host of other areas like

network configuration and engineering that are the real big opportunities of the

future. There is also a need for industry-academics collaboration to breathe

real life experience into the budding Bill Gates’ and Narayan Murthys’ of a

future era, which is an area that visionary directors like Sadagopan, Srivathsan

and Shaila Kagal (SCIT) are already working on with their considerable contacts

within the industry.

And it is not that excellence in one and two-year Information technology

programs need to be the exclusive preserve of the formal academic sector.

Institutes like Aptech and NIIT which pioneered the private training industry in

India and made it a role model for the rest of the world, have their own right

to a place in the sun if they show the sagacity and investment capability to set

a new course. Five years ago, the APTECH program in collaboration with the Open

University of British Columbia was only partially successful because students

could not appreciate the need for the large number of humanities courses that

were a mandatory part of the curriculum. But today, graduates of this program

have made a mark for themselves in the software industry.

A thought for the new generation of professionals who can be expected to

emerge from these institutions–The visionary Dr S B Majumdar, founder and

president of the Symbiosis group of colleges (now with deemed university status)

rightly exhorts his young students to think beyond their immediate ambitions to

adding real value–to their jobs, their industry and eventually to themselves.

A great base to build the great Indian IT industry of the future.

The author is chairman of the Maharashtra Council of the CII and deputy

chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies

He can be reached at ganesh@dqindia.com