Building New Capabilities

Speaking at a forum for CEOs and Management Accountants in Colombo, I was

amused to hear the strident views of Chandra Jayawardhene, one opinion leader in

the session. Commenting on the use of best practices in government, he mentioned

that ideally, politicians should focus on transparency first, then people's

issues, then party politics and finally on individuals ambitions.

In his view, Sri Lankan politicians followed the priorities in reverse!

Sounds familiar to many of us who watched the recent drama on the Indian

political arena. It is actually quite surprising how much the political

landscape in our southern neighborhood mirrors the development in our own

country. The identical transition from a pro-reforms high-growth regime to a

more left of center political configuration, raising the same questions of

continuity of pro-market initiatives. In fact, at the conference in Colombo, the

prime minister did little to assuage the fears of the gathered CEO community,

questioning even the concept of business excellence as a pre-requisite for the

nation's success. No fears that the Manmohan-Chidambaram configuration will

deliver such messages, but the trepidations of the stock market after a harmless

Common Minimum Programme only served to underline economic doubts accompanying

any political change.

One debate that continues to rage well after the untimely exit of Naidu and

Krishna and the comeuppance faced by Jayalalitha and Modi is—Is it doom for

Chief Minsters who push the IT cause? Would the next generation of politicians

—YSR and Deve Gowda and even the new telecom and IT minister—be better

served by focusing on the real issues, rather than become IT heroes? It's time

to take a dispassionate view on what went right and wrong with some of the

poster boys of the IT & government interface in this country.

Ganesh Natarajan Noises like making India the services hub of the world are great, but this needs to be backed up by specific acts of action and inaction—the latter of course being to ensure that no retrograde steps are taken in the area of tax benefits, which have put the industry firmly on the global map

Some insights came to me from a most unexpected source—a retired bureaucrat

from Andhra Pradesh who said the main problem with the previous CM was not his

love for IT, but his tendency to confuse information with knowledge. Recounting

stories of the famous morning video-conferencing sessions, where every district

satrap would be quizzed by the boss directly, bypassing the minister and the

secretary in the process. What's wrong with that, you say—isn't that

leadership from the front? The gentleman's point was that by inundating

himself with information and short circuiting the normal channels, the ability

to garner knowledge from the grassroots that tempered the core data and

information with the experience of people who had there for many years.

It is arguable that the same phenomenon of technology also generated data and

information over knowledge and wisdom and led to the undoing of the party at the

center as well. With this experience behind them, it is now upto the sagacity of

Singh and Maran to find the right balance between a sustained push for software

exports on one hand and IT proliferation in government, education and deployment

for the masses on the other.

Experience of success would surely have shown many local and state level

leaders, in politics as well as the bureaucracy that nothing succeeds in

engaging the attention of urban and semi-urban youth like the job opportunities

created by IT and BPO. In my own years of success at NIIT and Aptech, the one

lingering memory is the hope in the eyes of every youngster starting a computer

course as he or she dreamt of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. By

putting in the much needed infrastructure and opening up opportunities for

domestic companies to deliver the kind of value to corporations and governments

that the software exporters deliver overseas, there is still a lot of potential

in the IT revolution that wise politicians can and should convert to reality.

At the Colombo seminar, which was all about best practices, a researcher

asked me a thought-provoking question: "If knowledge management can

transform the way manufacturing and services companies build bridges with all

their stakeholders, why don't governments, which have the largest number of

stakeholders, embrace KM in e-Governance?" Why indeed? The industry waits

in hope!

The author is deputy chairman & managing director of Zensar Technologies

and chairman of Nasscom's SME Forum for Western India Ganesh

Natrajan