Information Technology

Jun 29, 2006
COBIT will see greater acceptance

• QAI helps organisations move toward business excellence;
• India is the third largest country in the adoption of BS7799;
• BS7799 is being replaced by ISO27001;
• New security standards are laying greater emphasis on implementation;
• India is known globally for success stories in the IT and BPO sector.

NEW DELHI -- As more and more Indian companies are becoming global MNCs and getting listed on the global stock exchanges, they need to adopt highest standards of quality for corporate governance and financial controls. IT governance becomes imperative to support the initiatives. Some Indian IT companies, such as Infosys, have taken a leadership role in this.

Indian companies have shown how one can select, recruit, induct, train, re-skill, track, assess, deploy talent, and move talent between projects. Such companies are demonstrating a huge set of global best practices to the world. Not just the IBMs and Accentures, but even Chinese companies such as Huawei are coming to India to learn the best and latest in quality. Helping the Indian IT and BPO companies for over a decade is QAI India.

QAI is Asia’s largest and world’s third largest firm in enterprise wide deployment of process initiatives that contribute to Operational Excellence. QAI India’s charter is to facilitate enhanced competitiveness amongst software, BPO and other knowledge-intensive organisations through multi-faceted interventions. It was set up in 1994 as Asia Pacific regional base.

Under the leadership of Navyug Mohnot, CEO, QAI India believes in contributing to the development of the ‘Nations of Software Excellence’ by working closely with the government bodies, government-funded agencies, research institutions, defense organisations, software parks, etc.

Convergence plus: How does QAI serve enterprises? At what level of the organisational and policy structure does it operate?

Navyug Mahnot: QAI works with organisations to move from process to operational to business excellence. QAI takes as a given the business vision/mission of the organisation  – i.e. it does not ask if an organisation is in the right business but asks if it is doing it in the right way. QAI addresses the areas of quality management, human capital management, process management, innovation management, change management, etc.

CP: How many companies have you worked with so far?

NM: In the private sector, QAI has worked with large and small private organisations, including IBM Global services, Accenture, Cognizant, Intel. In India, ironically, QAI hasn’t had the opportunity to work and service public or governmental agencies. In Singapore, for example, QAI has done extensive work the government and with various city and provincial governments, software parks, and industry associations across China, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Russia, etc., to facilitate software excellence.

CP: The BS7799 certification seems to have become the must-have certification in India. What is the current standing and scope of voluntary deployed frameworks like Cobit?

NM:  The BS7799 Certification has taken-off in India. As outsourcing and offshoring grows, customers are increasingly demanding data protection while offsite. It becomes imperative for the Indian service providers to get certified on the globally recognised security standards, to manage and minimise security risks. Offshore facilities, without proof of good security systems, are likely to lose business.

India is the third largest country after Japan and UK in the adoption of BS7799 certification. As per the recent statistics, we already have close to 170 certified firms in the country, as compared to just 28 certified in 2004. The growth has been phenomenal. 

However, as demonstrated in a few cases in the BPO industry in India, the BS7799 certification alone cannot guarantee that there won't be any security breaches. The BS7799 standard is being replaced by an upgraded and international standard; ISO27001. Certification against BS7799 is available only till March’06 and the certification is valid till mid-2007, by when, they need to transition to ISO27001. The new security standards are laying a greater emphasis on rigorous implementation and not only on documenting the security practices.

ISO27001 has given a lot of importance to the implementation activities, their effectiveness and on metrics measurements. Any organisation that plans for an ISO27001 certification will have to display a very strong implementation and an equally strong and effective measurement of all implemented controls as a practice. COBIT will see greater acceptance in the years to come.

CP: How are quality initiatives in the government enterprises different from those adopted in the private sector? Where does the gap lie and how can it be filled?

NM: Singapore sets the standard as far as the government pursuance of quality is concerned. India can learn from them. In fact, the private sector has much to learn from them. QAI has been fortunate to be involved with their public services 21 project from the Prime Minister’s office wherein transactional excellence in 28 departments of the Singapore government is being improved by QAI using Six Sigma.

CP: How can innovation help Indian IT and ITeS companies? What is the size of the innovation market in India? 

NM: The India success story in the IT and the BPO industries is very well documented globally. I’d like to quote Thomas Friedman in his article Oops I Told the Truth, published in the New York Times:

“The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they’ll work for less…”

Two questions come to mind when you witness such success stories

• How can these organisations maintain their innovative streak as they evolve to take on bigger roles in the global marketplace?
• Can other Indian organisations replicate their success stories – in short, can we have a thousand such companies prosper in India?

And the answer to both these questions will lie in the manner in which organisations go about creating the structure to nurture, sustain and institutionalise the process of innovation. This will demand teaching all employees, vendors, and other stakeholders in the ecosystem a new language – the language of innovation.

Post-WTO and 9/11, Indian organisations can use innovation to retain their individuality and profitability. One of the findings of the CII-BCG report is that more Indian respondents are satisfied with innovation returns than their global counterparts. These may be early days, since Indian businesses may need to view the returns from a global market share perspective.

These are early days and there are still no reliable figures available for the Indian industry on the size of the market. The NASSCOM-McKinsey study shows a potential of several billions dollars that can be earned over and above the hugely complimentary and bullish projections that they have made for Indian IT and ITES by and through innovation.

CP: How largely is innovation dependent on R&D - internal to companies and on the store of knowledge in Indian educational institutions?

NM: Innovation underpins all successful initiatives linked to business or operational excellence. Innovation is a holistic process involving the entire organisation.

The goal of innovation is to create business value by developing ideas from mind to market.

Pioneering work done since the 1940s involving a study of over three million patents and published literature on science and management has finally been able to lift the veil off innovation. Innovation has crossed the realm of creative flashes by a few extra ordinary individuals in R&D centers and boardrooms. It is now considered a skill that can be developed by anyone.

Besides solving complex business and technical problems that hinder operational excellence, the body of knowledge of innovation can be leveraged by the modern Indian businesses and other civil and defense establishments to push beyond operational excellence and move towards business excellence. They can apply the established patterns of evolution to the industry, market, company and products to leapfrog competition in launching the next generation of products and services.

They can apply established principles of failure to predict and prevent business discontinuity on account of minor interruptions and major disasters in civil and defense installations resulting from industrial espionage, criminal proceedings, conflict at workplace or the war on terror. They can protect their intellectual property from competition through patent fencing. They can find ways to workaround the limitations of existing patents through patent busting without incurring infringement suits.

The role of educational institutions will assume even greater prominence in teaching the language of innovation to all Indians. In Russia, even school children are being formally taught the skills of innovative problem solving based on I-TRIZ (Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) . In Japan there are over 2 million people trained on I-TRIZ.

CP: How widely has innovation appealed to the Indian large enterprises and SMBs?

NM: There is a lot of enthusiasm and passion to make India the hub of innovation. All trade bodies and all governments around the world realise this and speak about it. I have been amazed to find the intensity and passion with which firms of all shapes and sizes are considering ways to out-innovate their competition locally as well as internationally. We have already been approached by firms operating in India and with revenues ranging from US $2 million to over US $2 billion looking at innovation as the strategic differentiator. And these companies cut across all industries – and rightfully so – since innovation is not restricted to any industry.

In the recently concluded half-day management briefing for CXOs in Delhi and Bangalore and a three-day certification program on “Innovation” organised by QAI, we have had organisations from civil (both private and public sector), defense and government looking for innovative ways to meet their organisation goals – be it commercial or non-commercial.