'Talent in India is second to none'
The Economic Times:March 22,2008
As the pace of information flow as well as means of gathering information increase, making sense of the data flowing in from various streams assumes greater importance, says Dr Anant Jhingran, vice-president and chief technology officer, IBM’s information management division. While India presents its own challenges to this task like unavailability of complete information, its talent pool is a great advantage, he says. Excerpts:
Q: What is the compelling need for information management? And how has this market evolved?
A: The idea of information management is based on operating at greater than the sum of parts. In the 1980s, ’90s and even early 2000, a lot of IT deployment took place, driven by the applications agenda — how to do better CRM, ERP, risk management, etc. CIOs’ agenda had things like how to implement service-oriented architecture (SOA) and SAP deployment, etc. The applications agenda then led to business automation. As part of business automation, a lot of silos of information were created. So people did their ERP, built applications and had their own databases.
The next wave is business optimisation which means better things, not just cheaper. For instance, optimisation is not about supply chain management but demand forecasting, not about customer relationship management but customer retention and value add, not risk management but portfolio management.
In the age of business optimisation, the idea is to break those silos. The information-on-demand agenda is how you see information out of the silos.
Q: What are the challenges to this information-on-demand agenda?
A: There are business challenges. Clients say, “That’s all right but we have done it this way for years.” Technology presents some interesting challenges. One is when information is locked up in silos, no one knows the combination to unlock it. For instance, in dealing with a bank, there are ways in which a customer interacts — as a banking customer, as a MF customer and you can also be an insurance customer. For all these, there will be different ways of just writing your name — name first, surname later or surname first, name later.
You will be lucky if your name is exactly the same in all three. Then, information comes in various forms and shapes. You’re a banking customer and you apply for a loan. The bank doesn’t only interact with you through its banking staff but through calls made by its call centre, through e-mails. To get a holistic view of a customer, one needs to combine and recombine information. Then, the velocity as well as amount of information is increasing.
Q: Are the challenges in India different?
A: In India, the scale of problem is huge as it’s a practically untouched area. The amount of information is so high that the 20th largest bank here would have more customers than the largest bank in Europe. Information is incomplete in India. In the west, information can be wrong but not incomplete. For instance, India has no social security number, which makes information management a difficult task.
The good thing is that companies here are aware and they can leapfrog to the higher level. They don’t want to be equal to the west but better than them. It’s a given in today’s world that technology makes a difference.
The talent that is available in India to implement this is second to none. IBM has undergone changes from being a centrally-managed enterprise to a multinational to a global enterprise. So, we not only serve the local market through local talent but also the global market. We recently held a Web 2.0 contest and some of the best entries were from India. In fact, the top three entries were from Germany, Canada and India.
The India Research Lab plays a great role in the development of some of our best offerings. We are currently looking at business intelligence delivery using SMS and how a cellphone can be used instead of a laptop. While the core information would remain the same, the delivery of that information on a different form involves some variations like using a voice-based display, instead of a screen-based one.
Q: Which sectors are big consumers of information management solutions?
A: Government is a major consumer. While it may not use technology to break the silos it has created internally, it is actively using information management in case of citizen-facing applications. Banking and telecom are huge for us while retail and healthcare are also growing.