The Lost Opportunity

All of you are aware of the DQ Week

Annual Premier Reseller surveys we completed a couple of months back.

Many of you would also probably be aware of our sister publication

Dataquest's annual survey called Top20. As surveys that capture the

financial information of all sorts of IT companies and channel

partners, these are unique exercises in the annals of publishing

anywhere in the world. As many of you would be aware of my Dataquest

background, for many months of 2010, I have been traveling across the

country, meeting many of the top IT companies and channel partners

trying to gather information for the surveys.


Even as the industry and most of the

companies attempt to come out of the recessionary ennui, one common

observation for most of them has been their increasing dependence on

the potential of the Indian government vertical. While most

companies, ranging from hardware to software to IT services, were

plunged in probably the worst crisis in their relatively short life,

it was the increasing automation initiatives of the government, plus

its relative insulation from slowdown that made it such an attractive

proposition for most IT companies.


That the Indian government has finally

opened up on the technology automation front, both in terms of budget

as well as complexities of the adoption, is great news indeed for the

Indian IT industry and all its stakeholders. But at the same time

while it is making me happy and excited, I am feeling equally sorry

and apprehensive; and worse still, it is often leaving me

flabbergasted when I contemplate the opportunity lost.


So what's causing these mixed emotions,

and what do I mean by opportunity lost? With all sorts of IT vendors,

ranging from hardware or software majors to services biggies,

partnering the government on various e-government initiatives, I

would have expected the quality and availability of citizen-centric

services would improve manifold. Unfortunately, that does not seem to

be the case; worse;while IT was supposed to improve transparency and

quality of certain services, the effect has been, on the contrary,

worse. Now, neither the industry officials nor

the government bureaucrats are able to explain to me why this is

happening. Be it hardware majors like Dell, Cisco or HP, software

specialists like SAP or Oracle and even export-oriented services

players like Infosys, Cognizant or Mindtree are jumping into the

government bandwagon; all of them are swearing by the utmost

potential. But considering the strong corporate governance ethics and

measures these companies posses and what they bring to the table in

deals in other sectors, why is not the improvement getting passed on

to the e-gov functions they are handling? On the contrary we are

witnessing

instances like 3i Infotech, who were the empowered provider for CSC

services across a host of states, voluntarily giving them up,

complaining about the lack of transparency and the quantum of

corruption still involved. That they are willing to take a hit on

their topline in doing so is a sad indictment of the state of

affairs. Does that mean that conformance to the stringent parameters

that operate within an IT company is losing out to the debilitating

ailments that still pervade the very fabric of our government? Now, one

implied benefit of

e-governance was supposed to be the influence the workings of these

IT companies would have on the functioning of the administration. The

various checks and balances, the stringent productivity measures, the

ability to complete projects in a time-bound manner and most

importantly to imbibe the innate professionalism seemed to be the

biggest benefits for the government. But if these do not happen, it

is not just opportunity lost for all the stakeholders, but worse it

would be tantamount to regression of Indian administration. For the

Indian IT companies, it will be

the loss of a potentially lucrative revenue stream in the short run.

But in the long term, they will absorb the losses and move on to

other more attractive avenues. But for Indian citizens it will be a

lost opportunity as far as their tryst with better governance

measures is concerned. The hopes of reaping the benefits of

e-governance would vanish. And for the citizens there would be no

avenues to move on also. The big question is will Indian governance

fail Indian IT? And the even bigger question, will Indian IT fail

Indian citizens?