Digitisation in governance key milestone for India: Narayana Murthy

Need to get the Indian IT services involved in digitisation work

N R Narayana Murthy, co-founder and chairman Emeritus Infosys said that bringing the power of digitisation to the citizens residing in the remotest villages of India is what will truly herald India’s success in the digitisation initiative. Digitisation in public governance is the most important milestone of progress for our country.

Murthy also stated that for the implementation of these programmes the Indian IT services companies need to play a bigger role. He was speaking at the ABP Network’s first ‘Ideas of India’ Summit.

“Today our citizens have access to online retail, commerce, education, housing, healthcare etc. but the same results have not been achieved when it comes to digitised services provided by the government,” he added.

He said that for making digitisation work in public governance the first requirement is to enhance the readiness and the enthusiasm of the Indian software service companies to play a larger role in developing, maintaining and upgrading, digitalised systems for Indian government organisations and enhancing the readiness of the government for the successful deployment and adoption of appliances.

“The Indian software services companies have had a stellar record of developing information systems for public governance in countries like the UK, Australia, Canada and the US to name a few. From my own experience between 1981 and 2014 at Infosys, most large Indian software services companies hardly derive 10% of their services revenue from the domestic market and even a smaller number from the government sector,” he shared.  

Moreover, he pointed out that every project that Infosys took up of either a State government or the central government during that time (1998-2014) ended up in a loss. He also pointed out that when it came to working on government projects the hesitancy ran across the company.

“The best employees were reluctant to be part of a government project. The middle-level managers were hesitant to locate their best employees to such projects out of fear that these employees may leave the organisation. The project managers were hesitant to manage a government project since the accounts receivables would mount and remain at the Ministry even after a successful completion. Indian software services have tried hard but have not had as much success as they would have in helping our central and state governments with digitalisation,” he said.

Last year Infosys was in the news when the Income-Tax portal faced technical glitches and thousands of taxpayers were unable to file their IT returns on time. However, the issue was resolved and now the portal has been running smoothly.

Murthy while highlighting the need for the IT industry to play a bigger role also called out that managers at these companies should also learn to work with the bureaucrats at all levels. “By and large the Indian bureaucrats are second to none in the world, in their aspirations, enthusiasm and hard work,” he said.

When it comes to unsatisfactory results of government projects, Murthy attributed several reasons. For instance, there are inadequate quality and inadequate training software professionals deployed by the Indian software services companies. Lack of incentives for the professionals to take up projects for governments in India. Incomplete and inconsistent specifications, frequent changes and expansion of the scope in specifications made to a project, unrealistic price expectations and unreasonable expectations or outcomes.

“This discourteous treatment of professionals by the customers, lack of adequately trained professionals in the government to perform their role in a project, lack of customer accountability for timely and quality completion of their responsibilities, outdated models for evaluation and pricing. And as I said before, not paying the vendor for a long period even after the successful completion of a project are issues,” he pointed out.

Large-scale adoption of IT systems enthusiastically by the governments in India is therefore an important challenge that must be solved with a sense of alacrity. There are a few components to this solution.

First is the transformation of size. This is complex and in the end the success will depend on what culture we adopt. As Professor Peter Drucker once said, culture eats strategy for lunch, “…the biggest challenge for our country is whether we Indians can develop a culture of aspiration, national pride, problem solving orientation benchmarking with the global best professionalism, discipline, meritocracy, encouraging English education, hard work, quality, productivity, honesty, open mindedness, pluralism, humility, design desire to learn from people who will perform better than us and other attributes needed for country's digitalisation,” he added.

Second is training for software professionals to be deployed by software services companies in the Indian public governance system. Third, is creating an incentive scheme for software professionals, so that they participate more enthusiastically in public governance digitisation projects.

Fourth, is the education of professionals in our customer organisation, in both the sector of government and the state governments to perform on their expected role adequately in the development of a good digitalisation of the government system.