Exploring IT the CSI way

It was not a run on the mill event for Computer Spciety of India (CSI) this
time. The national convention of CSI saw confluence of technocrats, industry
bigwigs and enter-prise people giving their persp-ective on Indian IT.

Inaugurating the conven-tion, Deputy Governor of RBI V Leeladhar said that IT
deployment in almost all verticals has become crucial. "The need is to make
techno-logy affordable to common man," he added.

IIT Bombay professor Dee-pak Phatak added that we are not superpowers in IT
and we should not project ourselves that way. We have just two percent market
share in IT and we have lot to do to become an IT superpower. "There is an
incessant need to create IT professionals who can think innovatively if we want
to compete with the other world and its CSI prerogative to do so," he
opined.

The parallel tracks had sessions on IT in entertain-ment, innovative
application and solutions wherein CIOs threw light on application integration in
enterprises and emerging database technolo-gies. There were other techno-logy
sessions on knowledge management and language and speech recognition and on
banking and financial services as an industry vertical.

KPMG in its report on IT governance emphasized that area like IT governance
should be focused on five areas that include, strategic alignment, value
delivery, performance management, resource mana-gement and risk management.

KPMG global/ IRM partner in charge Egidio Zarrella said, "IT governance
involves more than technology that means IT management teams need to understand
the business pro-cesses that they have to deliver, and the roles of the team
members involved with each system and service."

Speaking on the database technologies Jayant Haritsa of Indian Institute of
Science said that database technology would rule the 21st century.

"Design of database engines has lots of really interesting intellectual
problems with practical applications that include theory, algorithms, data
structures, experiments, prototypes," he added.

In his keynote, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Software Engineering
Institute Paul Clement emphasized on software architecture evalua-tion and said
that software architecture is the earliest life-cycle artifact that embodies
significant design decisions. Analyzing for system qualities early in the life
cycle allows for a comparison of architectural options.

"Evaluation helps in early detection of problems, inclu-ding
unreasonable requireme-nts, performance problems and problems associated with
potential future modifica-tions. The earlier in the life cycle that problems are
found, the easier it is to fix them," he added.

The convention also had a CIO Summit that was focused on the unique
requirements of the modern IT heads. The session began by Franklin Covey lecture
on "Achieving Excellence in Executing IT Goals and concluded with a CEO
Conclave wherein CEOs and CIOs debated on tech-nology in businesses.

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