LEAP FROGGING TO THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

HOW DID OTHERS DO AND HOW SHOULD WE DO IT?

FAQIR CHAND KOHLI

TCS – Tata Consultancy Services, India

I am from India, I work for Tata Consultancy Services and I want to present to you what we’ve achieved over the last 35 years in software services. What we are doing today and what we hope to do in the next 2 to 3 years to take this process of revolution of information technology forward in India.

What I want to submit to you is how we started with the digital technology and IT technology and what the inputs we had to put in during the last 30-40 years where we are today and where we are going in the next 2-3 years. I am going to confine mainly to IT and digital technology and the other things, the political constraints, economic constraints and all that I think I would not be able to touch those sort of things and I am sure that digital technology and IT does fall to solution to most of our problems even including problems like …….150 million people.

We started our journey with the IT and digital technology sometime in 60’s when we became aware that ……mention of manufacturing processes and in building the cnn control systems for utilities, training simulators and in processing of large volume of data we need IT. Actually we installed the first digital controls for the power system in India in 1968, we were the 5^th utility in the world to do it, other 4 utilities were in the US, UK, France, Germany……on analog. We set up the first software unit in 1968, we were fortunate that we had a very clear assessment of technology and vision in early 70’s, we recognized the need for intelligent, capable and quality professionals, we also realized that we missed the industrial revolution due to reasons on which we had no control and that the new revolution, that is revolution in IT required to capability think clearly and this we had in abundance, this was revolution and which we could participate as equal. We also recognized that the technology was essentially in the USA and West and it was going at a rapid pace making the current technology absolute within 2 to 3 years, this meant that we need continuously review our knowledge and require continuing education in new technology. For this we built up relationship with many educational institutions in early 70’s, we build up a close relationship with the professional bodies in USA like the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), at home we started working with the Indian Institute of Technologies, Indian Institute of Science and other universities to dwell and integrate education and computer science and software engineering and we worked from the industry very closely with the faculties. Our vision coupled with the continuous building and updating of knowledge and helping building people started the software industry in India. In those early years we had some negatives and especially there was negative mind set of the government, politicians, bureaucrats and labor unions which considered computers to be cause of unemployment or in resulting in reduction of potential employment opportunities, there were import restrictions to import computers, in the early years it took us 2 to 3 years to get a computer. This attitude of the government had another fallout for us that instead of working within the country we started looking abroad and that is what led to our softer …….are bought from off shore and on shore. The software industry revenue 2004-2005 was 26.6 billion dollars out of 17.5 dollars came from exports of software and 5.1 billion from domestic work. Today industry has over a million professionals and many more at the support level. India’s hardware industry is lagging, it is about 4.5 billion dollars most of the hardware and digital components are imported and assembled and last year pc import was about 4 million pc’s. I’ll go over these figures later on in my submission what we are planning to do about the hardware. We do realize that IT’s both software and hardware, we fail to appreciate that hardware is as necessary as software, our focus due to earlier working difficulties had remained exclusively on software and much of it to export however we achieved a lot of things and I will just give you few with building people education and computer science, software engineering, other engineering disciplines, capability to train, retrain and provide continuing education in technology to light number we learned technical marketing, we created a credibility of our services abroad and also in quality and also delivery process we achieved something with the country can be proud of, the software engineering institutes which is set up by Carnigee Mellon and US Department of Defense has rating and highest rating is level 5 that is software engineering institutes level 5, out of 80 companies in the world, 40 of those are in India and recently last year they came with another standard which where the people’s performance, process orientation, training and other things what they call people’s capability model at level quality analysis in the country, this certifying body is in America and we are also have very thriving professional societies like Computer Society of India and branches of IEEE, IEE and other societies.

I said that India has done well in software designing development also in embedded software in services like business processors, outsourcing and IT enable services, I also mentioned that India’s revenue from software is going to 2.6 billion dollars but it is less then 3% of the world software. That is our future, our future is two fold that while we have applied some idea in India to small enterprises, making the retail efficient and productive, we have some e-government applications, we have some ERP and human resource development packages, we have done enough in financial industry, we put up our own national stock exchange which is totally computerized like Nasdaq in 9 months and we put up the national depositary which also we did for ………….another countries within 6 months however the size of Indian country and population has to use computers a lot more then what it is. We need at least 10 to 15 million pc’s a year, we need hardware industry, we need software in 26 languages, we’ve done well in English but there are only 5-6% of Indians who speak right and understand English. We have in the last 2 years working on producing affordable computers and today we can see the daylight that we can produce a fully configured pc with a monitor for less then 10.000 Rupes, which is equal to about 200 dollars. Simultaneously dwelling with the hardware base the country will need lot more micro electronic engineers, the country is at this point producing only 300 micro electronic engineers a year, master in micro electronic we have collaborated with some of the Indian Institute of Technologies for the last 3 years, we’ve dwelled the courses, the syllabus, the curriculum and micro electronic engineers and this year this institute is producing about 50 as against 6 three years ago and now the course work is available, the lab work is available, the software and test……by IT are being transferred to the other engineering colleges around the country, we’ve selected 100 engineering colleges around the country who can benefit from it and hopefully in next 2 to 3 years we’ll start producing 3000 micro electronic engineers a year rather then 300.

We have also done considerable work on Indian languages and today we have almost the operating system and some of the applications available in more then 10 languages and within the next 3 months we will have the operating system, the middleware and some of the application that are needed in all the 26 languages. Then after 18 to 24 months the whole process starts of computerizing the country. Now the future of the software abroad, we have enough experience, we are working together with the educational institutions, how to deal with complexity, uncertainty and we are building up 3 core competencies, 1 in system engineering and system dynamics, the other in software engineering as an engineering discipline and concurrent engineering. May be we will not be able to make packages like TRT but we will be able to dwell software engineering tools, we will be able to development tools who will take the whole process of development and we are working in bioengineering applying the IT extensively in drug design and drug discovery, biometrics and also we are in hardware engineering design and that will be fulfilled also after we produce a lot more micro electronic engineers and lastly we’re trying to upgrade our educational system. It is good but we want it better. We want more PhD’s, we want more masters in technology and recently the government of India and professional society and some of us in the industry have undertaken to upgrade 60 engineering colleges in the country who have the similar intake ……..caliber that go to Indian Institute of Technologies, those technologies produce 2.000 – 3.000 of those who go abroad and if we are able to do this after 3 or 4 years we will have 30.000 world class undergraduates not 3.000 and there will be enough to go for the post-graduate for and the graduate schools and this will start the research, innovation and other programs. Thank you very much.