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The Human Rights Agenda

Public managers, private managers, and the IT industry are the three groups of people who are essentially equal stakeholders as citizens. All of us interface with public institutions and access publicly delivered services. Since we are all, first and foremost, citizens, we actually bat for the same side.

I will not be very far off the mark to say that most of our efforts at IT reforms have either under-performed or have failed. It is little consolation that under-performance and failure in large implementations is not unique to India and is also not unique to government projects. Investments in IT have not met expectations and have not delivered the business outcomes envisaged in many private sector companies.

The basic problem in the past has been one of over promise and under delivery. There are various reasons for this problem. It will be instructive to list some of them.

The first is the glamour of technology itself. There are a number of instances, in the government, where hardware is purchased and installed first. Then the software is developed and by the time it is tested and stabilized, the hardware becomes obsolete.

The second problem is the overselling of technology and the underselling of the necessary business changes to make such technology work. The guilty party in this regard is largely the IT industry. While understandable, inter vendor competition and marketing strategies promote overselling. It is unfortunate that issues of procedural review and organizational restructuring are ignored or over simplified. This does more harm than good to the industry itself. Investment in IT is always risky.

The third problem is the over focus on technology. Many of us are led to believe that implementation of the technical system is the objective in itself. In most projects, the business goals are not clearly articulated whereas the installation of hardware is closely monitored against preset goals.

The next point, and to my mind a major reason for under-performance, has been the allocation of priorities. The highest priority is always given to the acquisition of hardware, far lower to the building of application software; this despite the fact that the only purpose of hardware is to support the application. And zero priority is accorded to addressing changes in processes, procedures, or organizational design. This has always led to a poor fit between the organizational design and culture on the one hand, and the IT systems on the other.

When we speak of the next generation government, we must keep in mind what the below 30 years old generation expects from its government. These expectations are a good basis to put together the long-term big picture as well as the strategic objectives for each line department of government.

The technology revolution has given us extremely powerful tools that can make it possible to actually dream about and imagine our future government. However, it must be remembered that what we are up against are awesome power dynamics that have shaped public organizations over the years.

The greatest challenge before both the government and the IT industry today is improving public governance in remote areas, in the villages, in the small towns, and to create easy access to public services through various public outlets to the rural communities, to uneducated or semi educated economically disadvantage citizens. Whether we like it or not, in a modern context, every citizen has to deal with the state in some form or the other on a daily basis. What we need to do is to create a government that works better, costs less, and produces results.

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