Fifth India Innovation Summit '09- Day 2- Panel Discussion- 1

Now's the time for Panel Discussion and the topic for the first panel was- Targeted IT Investments for Business Innovation. Here the panelists were:

• S Sadagopan, Director, IIIT Bangalore
• Diwakar Nigam, CEO, New Gen Software Technologies
• Subu Goparaju, Vice President & Head - SETLabs, Infosys

Prof. Sadgopan quipped that constraints help in aiding innovation. Gave an example of Bank of India. Who were one of the first to do a total outsourcing job. Technical and execution constraints helped them take that decision. That helped them go the path of significantly lesser expenses, and complete automation within 2 years or so as opposed to what would 7 years. Along the line, they crafted SLA norms that pretty much became the template for others to follow when crafting their own outsourcing engagements.
Another example was that of Tirupati Tirumala Temple. The temple authorities have large queues to deal with and came up with a specification that this problem has to be done away with and the technique applied should be executable in less that one minute and cost not more that one rupee per person. And he went on to describe the famous bar coded wrist band – how they cam about the technique. And the other challenges along the way – ensuring that it was water proof ( even if people bathed in the temple ponds ), could not be removed easily and passed on to others and was proven to be safe.
So constraints help. In the case of downturns too, it can be taken advantage for creating winning innovations. The other message was about how IT can be leveraged for solving this problem.

Diwakar Nigam opined that in downturn, the first response is to go on the cost cutting path, and IT can help in this. In Downturn, Business Intelligence and Mining can help – to increase models and increase market shares. Another cost takeout can be by using low cost BPM processes and streamlining business functions. Basically business agility is important in a downturn and IT can be leveraged for the same.

Subu mentioned that during downturn, more focus is on open innovation and open source in his organization. Focus in general in IT innovation will be on improved analytics, collaboration, and efficiency. He said, the current IT adoption in India can be improved. The IT is taken to rural through mobile phones and there is a lot of scope for innovation there.

It too was a well recieved discussion.