Dataquest and Cybermedia organized a conference for Indian public sector entities on 1st of March 2013 in New Delhi. The conference was sponsored by Panasonic and Tata Consultancy Services. I delivered a small talk on technology supported transformation to the audience, that had in addition to Dataquest correspondents, senior Public sector entity representatives, Panasonic India brass and TCS senior functionaries from the Manufacturing and GIS domain. Key points touched upon are summarized below:
Technology supported transformation in the public sector, as in other entities, is a play between people, process and technology. Transformation is a difficult and often painful process that entails change, challenges existing ways and pushes an organization into new processes and modes of doing work. This is often a difficult and delicate exercise and requires to be handled with care.
Successful transformation goes through three distinct phases:
Pre technology introduction preparation: Before introducing a new technology the organization needs to be prepared and oriented towards accepting this change.
The business requirement specifications should be created and placed within an overall business architecture. Procurement of vendors to build and implement technology should be undertaken only when these two actions have been concluded.
Technology implementation phase: Process re-engineering exercise is undertaken by the vendor as the first step in implementing new technology. This should be a joint exercise in which teams from the public sector entity and the vendor. This will help in getting the as is and the to be processes absolutely right.
As the project goes through the various stages of project implementation- requirement definition, design and then implementation, clients and vendors should hand in hand work as a team.
Managing change is a critical component and this requires training, orientation and re-orientation of organization people and teams.
Post implementation phase: Change management, and technology maintenance and implementation support is undertaken at this phase.
As long as the exercise of transformation is done in a spirit of collaboration between the PSU and the vendor, chances of successful implementation is high and change happens with minimum hardship.
