e-Gov's 'Central' Dogma

Need an example of tech deployment blocked not by tech but by people issues?

Look no further than e-Governance. Not just in India, but yes, that's the

story closest home.

Take e-Gov's top bottleneck: replication. Almost all e-Gov initiatives in

India face this. The pilot works fine: yet, a year later, in the next state, the

wheel is re-invented. A similar project is started from scratch, sometimes by

the same SI or vendor (say NIC).

Most states say: “Our needs are unique. Our formats are different. Land

records, health, police...how can state subjects and tech projects around these

be replicated? Or served from a Central server and application?”

Yet giant, complex, corporations work across 150 countries each with unique

legal, financial, HR regimes...but they use a central HR, ERP and workflow app.

“Ha, they're nothing compared to the complexity of India,” say the

officials. How about the Indian Railways: 14 million passengers daily, a nation

served from a benchmark central, online, web-enabled app?

An MNC uses one data center for its global ops, with a backup and a DR site.

Yet, even the USA's states insist on having their own physical data centers in

their own territory, multiplying costs. That's the role model for Indian

states, distrustful of the Center and its potential access to their data. Apart

from the costs, it means that most of our states will not have a data center for

the next 5 years. And yet we could easily have a cutting edge, central national

data center with DR and backup, and have all the policy level control that

states want, to segregate their data completely.

Complexity begins in the minds of men. And it is there that we must look to

bring down the barriers to rapid e-Gov deployment.

The media doesn't just report: every now and then, it takes up a cause.

There's a wide spectrum we've taken up through CyberMedia's publications:

from Open Source and CD ROMs, to 'operation bandwidth', wireless licensing

and mobility, to biotech policy.

This issue rounds off the first phase of our year-long e-Gov mission. We

started in 2005 with Dataquest's first e-Gov Summit. The four-city event took

the discussions “beyond the pilot” and discussed failures, not just

successes, and set the stage for the discussion and articles that followed.

This then evolved the 2006 Summit across Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata,

supported by India's Department of IT (DIT), and including the regional e-Gov

awards. This Version 2.0 of the Summit had a specific purpose: evolve a

ten-point e-Gov agenda. Just ten straight, specific, actionable points that the

DIT and other stakeholders could execute in 2006-07. This issue presents the

draft of that agenda, and we seek your inputs, response, additions. Please do

write to me.

Prasanto K Roy



pkr@cybermedia.co.in