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?