INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

A Newsletter of IFIP Working Group 9.4
and
Commonwealth Network for Information Technology

Volume 8, No3, January 1998
Editor: Subhash Bhatnagar

January 1998

West Indian Seeks IT Insight in the East

Stewart Bishop

University of West Indies, Barbados

A chance meeting in late September with Dr. Mohan Kaul, Commonwealth Secretariat, who was visiting the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, convinced me that my attendance at two IT activities being held a few months later in Ahmedabad would be very beneficial. Those activities were (i) an International Workshop on IT for Building Competitive Enterprises hosted by the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad (IIMA) and (ii) the XXXII Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India (CSI-97) to be held in that city.

The question of finance predictably appeared to be the major hurdle. However this was resolved quickly as the Commonwealth Secretariat offered to cover costs whilst in India. Travelling expenses were readily assumed by PRT (Barbados) Ltd., a Barbados based Software Company which provides software services for major North American corporations. PRT had relocated from India a few years earlier and currently has a number of Indian IT professionals on its staff. Efforts are now being made to recruit locally and regionally. PRT’s head of Operations, Vishi, I was to discover, is well known in the IT fraternity of India.

Preparations for the trip were hectic. These included a one day visit to neighbouring Trinidad to secure the relevant visa. I duly reached IIMA on November 9 after more than 24 hours in aeroplanes and in terminals at London and Bombay. There I joined almost twenty participants from developing countries (DC’s) from Africa and Asia whose attendances were also supported by the Commonwealth Secretariat - a major contributor to COMNET-IT, one of the organizers of the Workshop.

International Workshop

The three-day workshop addressed such topics as:

• Emerging information technologies such as networking, Internet and Intranet and the potential benefits from the implementation of these technologies.

• Frameworks for understanding the status of IT applications and associated benefits so as to define IT’s role in the organisation.

• Frameworks to align IT strategy with the organisation business strategy and thus achieve competitive advantage

• Factors to ensure successful IT implementation IT management issues

A number of excellent presentations by IIMA’s faculty were followed by discussion among the participants who were able to identify particular problems or situations with which they were familiar. However it was the well-chosen and well documented case-studies from Indian and Singaporean corporations which definitely brought the issues firmly to our attention. These cases can be categorised as relating to:

Harnessing IT for Organisational Benefits

Herein experience with IT utilisation at an Automobile company indicated the need to promote, within any organisation contemplating IT introduction

• The fundamental importance of IT

• Involvement of users in the design of the system

• The ultimate ownership of systems by users.

Through its recognition of a dynamic IT environment, that company has been able to successfully plan its IT utilisation from the batch processing operations of the 1970s to the current Open Systems installation.

IT for Competitive Advantage

IT is increasingly being recommended as the vehicle to help firms outperform their competitors. However it must first be determined how their efficiency and effectiveness have been improved. Any competitive advantage from IT may result only from its utilisation in strategic projects. The case of a Bank in Singapore was utilised to demonstrate how a conscious effort had to be made to achieve strategic business growth. Innovative approaches were followed in various aspects such as the nomination of a Vice President, a non-IT person, as IT Project Leader. Business Process Re-engineering, for example, in its Share Custody System, was also instituted.

Successful IT implementation

According to Frank Land, one very important factor determining the success or failure of an information system is how the process of implementation is managed. One IIMA professor asserted that, for him, "in IT, vision is 15% and the rest is implementation." An essential element in this phase is the actual planning particularly, the management of the change process. The implementation of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) at an Indian Airport was cited as an example of a successful one. This ultimate success resulted, to a large extent, from the prior streamlining of operations relating to cargo handling.

Overall the most effective presentation at IIM, for me, dealt with "Managing IT Infrastructure", for herein, one got an idea of the long list of IT aspects which have to be managed if IT is to be successfully implemented. In words ideally relevant to participants from DCs, the presenter cautioned that one must

• Guard against aggressive IT vendors

• Demand better support and maintenance services

• Shift focus from technology to application

• Slow down the pace of technology procurement

• Emphasize and institute, educational and training programs at all levels in the organisation.

A most pleasing feature of the Workshop was the quality and quantity of material that was made available to the participants. This contained not only presentations and case studies but also reprints of articles which gave a historical background to such issues as effects of IT on competition, IT implementation and common information systems mistakes made by organisations. This was an excellent Workshop with a collection of participants who cooperated well with each other. IIMA staff was very helpful and accommodating and thus enhanced the enjoyment of our stay there.

Annual Convention (CSI-97)

The Conference theme, "IT for Organisational Excellence" was most appropriate since it reflected the importance of IT in the search for improved performance within organisations in business or governmental sectors. Currently IT has been applied in the quest for public reform in both developed and developing countries. Activities at CSI-97 included tutorials, keynote addresses, invited papers, technical sessions, discussions and an exhibition. Social activities were also organised. However, due to a clash of events at IIMA with activities at the Convention and an inopportune go-slow involving domestic air carriers, my attendance at CSI-97 was severely affected. The published Proceedings has, to a large extent, compensated for this.

Tutorials

These pre-convention tutorials, held over two days and conducted by internationally recognized experts, were designed to address state-of-the-art topics through discussions, case studies and presentations. The topics were

• Internet/Intranet, Java and Distributed Computing

• Multimedia Applications for Planning and Implementation

• GIS and its Application to Resource Planning

• Data Warehousing and Data Mining

• WWW Strategies and Opportunities for Business

• Harnessing IT for Organisational Benefits

• Building Distributed Applications: Tools and Techniques

• Emerging Trends in LAN/WAN Data Communication Technologies

I attended the two tutorials on Internet/Intranet and WWW, and was particularly intrigued in the latter with the attention given to the precaution which had to be taken to ensure that "making money on the net" could become more than a cyberspace dream. At the end of the two days there was clear consensus that those two tutorials achieved the objectives of bringing these state-of-art topics more clearly to the participants. Here too the material handed out were of lasting benefits with the inclusion of WWW Frequently Asked Questions taken from the Web and articles on Electronic Commerce.

Convention Presentations

The Convention started on a high note with two plenary sessions, the second of which featured a video conference from Delhi in which the government’s plan for building an Information Highway was outlined. A discussion followed with prominent Indian corporate managers serving as panellists. The first plenary session featured two keynote addresses on:

• IT for Organisational Transformation, and

• Building World Class Software Organisations

Panel discussions were held in some of the Plenary Sessions. Unfortunately I had to default on the invitation to be part of the panel which discussed Experiences from Commonwealth Countries in the utilisation of IT for Organisational Excellence.

Comment from Subhash Bhatnagar, coordinator of the workshop: Four participants served as panellists in this session which was attended by nearly 800 delegates. The presentations from the panellists were received very well. Several delegates found Mr. Henry Nyambu's witty presentation of his experiences in Gall Sheet Ltd Kenya to be one of the best presentations of the conference.

In the concurrent sessions such topics as client-server systems, software development, end-user computing, artificial intelligence, education and training, intranet/internet and IT applications were discussed. Of particular interest to me was, the topic of software development since India has much to demonstrate in the area. Other developing countries including Barbados have been striving to develop information services sectors in which software development has a prominent position.

From the first plenary session it was stated that, to develop a world class software organisation, one needed high ambition, good technical, financial and personnel management, a good mix of business involvement and innovation. In such a dynamic field one had to be responsive to customers need and changes in technology in order to remain competitive. Software development is still much a people oriented business and most development organisations experience much difficulty fulfilling the demand for quality personnel. Education and training of the workforce should always be a major preoccupation and several presentations addressed this topic. One suggestion was the need to reengineer IT management education to assist IT management in

• Aligning IT to business strategy

• Communicating in the language of business

• Managing the IT infrastructure

Internet/Intranet issues were discussed in several presentations. Electronic Commerce is being pushed as the new wave and hence security and correct approaches to Web advertising/marketing received some attention. Whilst the WWW has many advantages over other forms of advertising, much attention has to be paid to the design and maintenance of a company’s website. A potential customer must be compelled, through its design, to return to a company website. Examples of good and bad websites were demonstrated.

The published Proceedings of CSI-97 contains forty papers and extended abstracts on a wide range of topics. Included therein are a number of invited papers on topics of current interest.

Exhibition

The CSI-97 Exhibition was held at a site approximately 10 minutes away from the Convention Centre. Whilst there was transportation provided between these two areas delegates were somewhat inconvenienced. However at the Exhibition, IT companies displayed a wide range of their products.

Insights Gained

The two IT activities at Ahmedabad provided those participants from other DCs a wonderful opportunity to see how India has become a significant player in the global IT arena. The sessions at IIMA gave a good insight into the effective use of IT in organisations with an emphasis on the role management must play. The frameworks for achieving competitive advantage through IT were outlined and in the final session the example of a leading Indian newspaper complemented what we had discussed throughout the Workshop.

IT associations have critical roles in DCs (i) to educate and enlighten citizens and (ii) to lobby governments to initiate sound strategies and projects for IT diffusion. The Computer Society of India is an excellent example of an effective association. Thus attendance at CSI-97 left many of us wishing that there was a similar association in our countries. There would then be an obvious forum in which IT professionals from public and private sectors could meet and seek to develop relevant approaches to IT diffusion for development.

The visit to India gave me an experience of an Eastern culture. Whilst I had been warned that I was in for a "culture shock", I still wasn’t prepared. The millions of people, the modes of transportation, even the spicy foods (although I managed these competently) all served to make the visit a memorable one.

Many thanks then have to be extended to my Indian friends at Ahmedabad and at PRT (Barbados) who together ensured that I gained both IT and cultural insights.

Besides the academic value addition to the participants, the workshop generated a considerable publicity for COMNET-IT. Write up about the event was carried in all the major Newspapers published in India through their editions from Ahmedabad. A write up was also carried in several Newspapers published in the local language. The contributions of the COMNET-IT and Commonwealth Secretariat were acknowledged in the CSI Convention inauguration, conclusion and in many other sessions. Many magazines are likely to carry a report on the workshop. One of the workshop participant, Mr. Rogers Okot-Uma was also asked to chair a session on Software Project Management in the Convention.