The conundrums facing my son, a 12th grade student in India

I just step into my son's room. He resembles a zombie nowadays. His hair is rumpled; He looks dazed; He wakes up constantly in the middle of the nights to murmur some gobbledygook; You guessed it right, he is a student of grade 12, having completed the board exam, trying to navigate the next steps to chart a path into the world of tertiary education.

Need of the hour is authentic information on colleges, courses, research quality, etc. available freely on the Internet. Every university proclaims #1 ranking in some aspect with 100% placement in all the courses! 

Universities abroad feel an obligation to the prospective students in terms of information sharing. In UK for instance, there is a is a clear compendium of complete university guide available on the Internet. Various rankings and the methodology behind it, student – teacher ratio, alumni information, academic calendar, courses offered, faculty details and even course and hostel fees details are published. These are validated data.

This aside, the whole process of applying to the colleges itself is cumbersome and could well do with some fine tuning. It has become a source of revenue for many institutions. Filling up application forms with same information in different formats and making multiple photocopies of all required certificates is the next task looming ahead of me.  Colleges have designed application forms to suit their admission process. They verify all the information and documents collected. Instead the education boards can be authorized to capture and authenticate the details in one place and share with the universities. Many countries have switched over to a common application for the prospective undergraduate students. This service is provided by a government body that sends out the information to the universities. At one stroke, it saves lot of time and removes duplication of work.  This, in no way, takes the right of the institutes to ask for more specific information.

Then comes the innumerable entrance tests. A common aptitude test can be the basis for admission to a large number of UG programs. Streams like medical, law, engineering, architecture require their own tests like JEE, NEET etc. We have government as well as private institutions administering tests. Why can't the government arrive at a master list of 4 or 5 tests for admission to the UG programs in India? That way, a student will be required to take only the appropriate tests depending on the course of his desire. If it is engineering, there should be one test that is used by every university in India. Some colleges administer tests and interviews at their campuses only, thereby including a travel agenda for the outstation student and parents.  Instead, all tests can be administered by a central body like NTA (National Testing Agency) in a flexible manner over a longer duration. Imagine if this is offered online multiple times. For example, NEET can be administered online in all district headquarters from April to June 3 times. The students can appear multiple times or once as per his/her will. The maximum distance for travel will be to the nearest district office. On top of it, if the scores can be made available to the institutes directly, think of the benefits to our student community. The institutions also stand to benefit as they get validated scores from authorized bodies of government. My imagination is running riot here!!!

Let me step back into reality. My calendar and his are full for the next few weeks with filling forms, making photocopies, arranging for demand drafts, appointments at colleges for application submission and booking train tickets for tests in different cities. This is like a full-fledged project work! But that alone is not enough.

Success is when tests and interviews are cracked and admission secured! Who slogs and actually faces the acid tests? Oh! In the entire melee, I have forgotten that. Pardon me, I have to rush to motivate my son!

How much business value is added by your IT division?

You are the consumer of IT services in your organization. How do you ensure you get the maximum business value from them? Of course, it is second nature to think of IT adding lot of value. But, how do you see it? It is likely that you get a set of huge reports from the CIO showing metrics and other related things, most of them almost always green. Have you taken time to sit down with them and ask them to explain why there are important metrics and how they relate to you?

There are the three broad dimensions in terms of adding business value:

• Speed of delivery
• Quality of delivery
• Customer experience (# options, # value added services, Ease of operating a channel, Omni-channel, service offerings etc.)

If your IT is to become a value-added partner to business, it should:

• Assure the business that security is not compromised, the applicable regulatory changes are adhered to and ensure there is a plan B always in terms of disaster recovery. This is the bottom-most layer and a sine qua non today.
• Promote innovation and be a true partner to business.

 It is the latter that we are discussing in this article. Here are some pointers to get around this:

Pointer #1: If you don’t question and understand your IT’s output,

your customer will do so in no time consequently leading to more costs. Do not accept metrics or any report from IT without a sitting. Good metrics, however good they are, do not tell much about business. High uptime of an ATM is good. Imagine the loss of ATM for a minute on an important occasion like boxing day. If your IT team is able to resolve all the issues within the agreed time (SLA – Service Level Agreement), very good. By themselves, all these metrics may not mean much. Do not be afraid to dig deeper and learn further. At the end, you as well as the IT must be convinced there is merit behind the metrics. Usually, the clue is to have a few meaningful metrics that can be directly or indirectly correlated to your or business KPIs.

Pointer #2: Whenever you have a meeting with IT, are you getting inundated with technical mumbo-jumbo too often? Perhaps, there is a problem. It is not uncommon today for everyone to exhibit how “digitally aligned” they are. This is ok to start with. If someone, from IT, including a thorough-bred architect cannot explain in plain English whatever proposals they are acting on and their corresponding business benefits, chances are that they require more meetings to unravel the mystery.

Pointer #3: Before you can question the IT, have you spent time with them articulating your business goals and priorities? Have you taken them into confidence? Do they know your KPPs? Do they know the direction you are planning to take? Do they understand where you are trying to invest? Share with them transparently. Make them understand what you are doing. If you change your priorities, let them know.

Pointer #4: Leave the management of the IT to the CIOs and do not get into too much nitty-gritties. Giving them the required freedom is essential. At the same time, do not allow yourself to be outmanoeuvred by the CIO that the IT reports are bound to be voluminous as the IT is outsourced to many vendors. The last thing, you want to be afraid of is the fact that there are n vendors supporting your IT portfolio. Whether your IT is insourced or outsourced doesn’t eliminate the need for your IT to present a single view to you. Demand from them.

Pointer #5: We should use IT and technology to see how they can add value to the business process. IT can be a great enabler to open new channels. They can help you to cut costs. If you happen to call them only when you have a break-down or an irate customer, perhaps you are not making use of IT to the full extent. Remember, in today’s world, more strategies are designed keeping IT in mind. The more they participate and the more freedom they have, the better they can come up with alternatives. But agree with them upfront on the “definition of success” for each important business initiative.

Is Indian civil society prepared for the fourth industrial revolution?

The fourth industrial revolution is here to stay for a while! This comes with its own set of constraints, opportunities and challenges. How can we, in India, rise to these challenges? We have a fairly participative democracy. Of course, we still need to go a long way. But the digital equality, amongst the citizens, is on the rise. Given this, how we, as citizens, including organizations, Labour unions and other development units, use emerging technologies in order to make a more meaningful impact matters a lot.

To see how well India is prepared, we need to look at it from two aspects.

1 The use of emerging technologies in day-to-day space and the digital equality

There are various aspects of emerging trends in technologies that matter in our context. Some of them are:

• Data (Public / Private)
  
• AI and machine learning
• Drones
• Blockchain / distributed ledger technologies
• Augmented / Virtual reality

 Both our government, private and other developmental organizations have been engaged with the civil society using emerging technologies in order to provide delivery to the common man, communicate new information and make it available to one and all, track and monitor efficiency of schemes, share updated forecast available etc. One example is the humanitarian data exchange project launched by the UN in 2014. This provides a data sharing platform for humanitarian organizations. This has been a boon in more than one way.

2 Our response to these challenges and considerations

We have seen various scandals in the usage of these technologies by governments and other organizations. Cambridge Analytica used more than 50 million facebook profiles in the US election; UK government deported thousands of students based on a flawed algorithm to identify fake results in tests. What these mean to us is how we respond in terms of fairness, ethics, transparency and accountability. The on-going elections continue to pose many challenges including digital misinformation.

Do we know that the international committee of the red cross published a book on data protection in humanitarian action? This gives guidelines on how to apply data protection standards for collecting and safe-keeping of data. All the digital data generating entities as well as consuming ones need to be aware of this. The more AI and other technologies spreads into every aspects, the more likelihood of widening digital inequality and rising non-transparency!

In order to rise to the challenges, we need to strengthen digital literacy, reduce digital inequality in terms of access and usage and start building standards and guidelines borrowing from other international organizations.

As a responsible civil society members, we need to be aware of the role expectations. 

We should be prepared to play the role of a watchdog that holds all the players in the digital data from creation to consumption to accountability.

We should be advocates of openness and awareness.

We should be able to define standards.

We should be able to exhibit various characteristics like independence (especially when using public and private data), motivation, passion for learning etc. that underpin the readiness to make use of the fourth industrial revolution.

Government will be an important catalyst. So are the private and non-profit o

rganizations. They must come together, look at the best practices of international organizations as well as governance (for e.g. Scandinavian way of delivering goods and services to end consumers, public-private participation in Netherlands etc.) and build ourselves a resilient and equitable society.

References (These are worth having a look at)

• International Red Cross – Data Literacy Playbook 
• Digital Impact Toolkit helps civil society organizations with checklists, templates.
• Open Algoithms Project (OPAL)
• Digital Social Innovation for Europe
• What is a data trust?
• An example for a service delivery in vaccine delivery
• Habitat for Humanity
• The Internet Society is a volunteer driven organization to promote and preserve internet’sopenness
• Handbook on data protection in humanitarian action