Information technology: redefining boundaries

Abstract

Information Technology seems to be revolutionising every field, ranging from the very concepts of knowledge and of communities to the governance of countries and corporates. Given its immensity, how do we make sense of the IT juggernaut? What is its actual potential and amplitude?

Can business innovation lead to the formation of a whole domain of knowledge? Can the digital replace the physical? Is the Internet truly a mass medium? What does the network of tomorrow with its increased bandwidths and its all-embracing sweep of data, voice and video augur for communications in general and business in particular? Will web services displace software? Is E-Commerce more a fad than a practical proposition? How do you relate technology to the business objective? What are the skills required to meet these developments?

Will India's competitive advantages in software be usurped by new, computer-savvy countries? Is Made in India an acceptable label? IT is making forays into the mainstream of Indian government but how relevant is the IT revolution to a country like India, with wide disparities of income and of access to knowledge? Given the impersonal nature of the web, how do we deal with the paradox of the increasingly isolated individual in a connected world? Professionals from leading Indian IT firms dealt with such questions as they discoursed on the many ways in which IT was redefining boundaries.

In any software organisation, the person directly in the firing line is the project manager. He has to cross functional lines and deal with a variety of interfaces. Collating data from executive development programmes held in IIMB, V Anand Ram and S Jagadish elaborate on the challenges faced by project managers in the software industry as they walk the tightrope between technical, administrative and interpersonal skills. V B Kaujalgi looks at how far bank automation has to go in India before it makes the transition to the next millennium. With demand being greater than supply at present, the highly competent and competitive IT professional is riding the wave. N M Agrawal benchmarks the human resource practices of Infosys and Wipro, two leading Indian IT firms, to see what they do differently to retain their people. In the present knowledge era, creativity and innovation are absolutely essential for an organisation to be in the reckoning. Umesh Rajamani discusses the role of IT in 'knowledge management', the catch phrase of the new world.