The Hindu Business Line : Men who made IT happen

There is all the tall talk about software exports and the infotech revolution, but no one talks about the contributions and facilitations of the Government sector, bemoans B.K. Syngal in one of the essays included in Reflections by IITians, compiled by Ram Krishnaswamy (www.reflectionsbyiitians. blogspot.com), and released at the recent PanIIT event in Chennai. Without the Government sector's contribution, there would have been no success stories such as Infosys and others in the private sector, adds Syngal.

"My golden era began when India's visionary telecom Czar Sam Pitroda, another technocrat who had returned to India from the West fired by a dream to connect India, offered me a simple deal: `If you want to make money, don't come back to India. If you want a challenge, come to VSNL'," the author reminisces.

It was thus, with a pay of Rs 9,000 per month, that he took over as the Chairman and Managing Director of VSNL, `a dreary telephone monopoly' at that time. He speaks of the transformation that happened between 1991 and 1998 - from "an overseasswitched- voice company into an internationally recognised telecommunications corporation offering a full range of state-ofthe- art digital services."

This connectivity transformation, explains Syngal, opened the entire new vista for India's knowledge industry to look for challenges. "Most historical accounts of the Indian software industry boom will remain incomplete if they do not highlight the contributions of VSNL," he observes.

Quite nostalgically, Syngal declares that he is proud to be part of the breed of engineers who built India's giant public sector corporations, men who resisted the much fatter private sector pay packets to pursue the dream of making India self-sufficient in technology.

"Today, the situation is rather different. Political interference, restrictive regulations, managerial apathy and poor work culture have turned large parts of India's public sector into a wasteland."

Impressive collection of insights.

Open mine

One of the oldest rules in mining is the secrecy of exploration and reserves data, but Rob McEwen was an outsider when, in 1989, he became the majority shareholder in an old, under-performing gold mine in Ontario, Canada, called the Red Lake mine. He was sure that high-grade gold ores existed somewhere within his land; only he could not discover them. The trigger occurred at a computer technology forum, where McEwen heard about Linux and how the operating system's programming codes were available to anyone so that they could propose improvements, narrates Paul Sloane in The Leader's Guide to Lateral Thinking Skills (www.vivagroupindia.com). So, what did McEwen do?

"He published all the masses of geological and statistical data about the mine on his Web site and made it available to anyone. In March 2000, he issued a challenge, the Goldcorp challenge, offering prizes totalling $5,00,000 to people who predicted the best place to drill for gold. The rest of the mining industry was amazed and sceptical."

Ready takeaways.

Computer in a temple

In the Kizhoor temple, sitting like a presiding deity is a computer, describes Guy Sorman in `Internet at Pondicherry,' a chapter in The Genius of India (www.atfullcircle. com). The villagers use the computer rather than worship it, he finds.

"The villagers use the Internet to search for the information they require: where to buy seeds and fertilisers at the best price and what the market price of their produce is. Armed with such information, they cannot be cheated by middlemen.

Bus timetables can also be consulted on the Net. This is a boon as it spares them a long wait for the bus in the scorching sun or pouring rain."

Sorman is reminded of the 1980 work `Le D‚fi Mondial' by Jean-Jacques Servan- Schreiber, which had predicted that each Indian peasant would have a computer hooked up to a satellite through which he would get all the information he required. "Like the Hindu god Shiva, perhaps JJSS too had a third eye and foresaw the future much ahead," Sorman wonders.

"The Gospel says that no man is a prophet in his own country and the Talmud says that one has to be mad to prophesy when the time is not ripe."

Interesting perspective.

Two vulnerabilities

Auditing Enterprise 2.0 for security vulnerabilities can be broken down into two pieces, say Aaron C. Newman and Jeremy G. Thomas in Enterprise 2.0 Implementation (www.tatamcgrawhill.com). One, look for publicised security holes in off-the-shelf software, such as WordPress, Socialtext, or Twiki; and two, review in-house applications.

As an example of the former, the authors describe a vulnerability found in the blogging platform, thus: "WordPress accepts a year parameter passed in the URL, which is used to set the title of the HTML page. When this parameter is used in the WordPress function wp_title, it is not properly sanitised, allowing arbitrary characters to be inserted into the HTML of the page being viewed."

This weakness, discovered in 2007, allowed cross-site scripting - with an attacker tricking `a person into running malicious JavaScript or manipulating the page they are viewing.' The weakness was, however, fixed in version 2.1.3, but newer vulnerabilities continue to be found, the authors observe.

They advise, therefore, that you need to be vigilant about watching for new upgrades and applying them. "The hacker depends on the fact that an application may go years without being hacked, lulling the administrator into not patching it."

Recommended addition to the tech-shelf.

Choose channel of communication

Think of your e-mail message as a personal, virtual memo, advises Paul Turner in Organisational Communication: Role of the HR professional (www.jaicobooks.com).

Other tips that he cites (from Morris, 2000) include: "Use a conversational and informal tone, but remain professional. Feel free to use contractions like `I'm,' `we'll,' and so on. Write in complete sentences. (`Here's the information you asked for' is more respectful and grammatically sound than `Information follows.')"

In the list of don'ts are the use of unnecessary capitals, signing off with `yours faithfully,' letting your spoken style descend into slang or computer jargon, spelling mistakes, and the rush in responding especially when you are angry. The channel of communication is highly important, given the fact that there is so much choice, Turner counsels.

"For example, using a presentation alone to explain a complex new pension or flexible benefits system in an organisational context would not be an ideal method of communication. In the opposite way, telling someone via e-mail that they had lost their job would hardly be considered good HR practice." Worth a study.

E-democracy

One of the most promising aspects of eGovernment, from a democratic perspective, is the way it can empower citizens and increase their participation in public activities, say Kjell A. Eliassen and Nick Sitter in Understanding Public Management (www.sagepublications. com).

The authors find the European Commission's Web page as a demonstration of edemocracy at all levels. "First simple features, such as information on policies, regulation and laws and new updates on audio visual, are provided. Second, the discussion forum, Discuss Europe, with designated questions is published. Third, white papers are posted in order to get contributions or feedback from individuals and business." The outcome of public consultation is also posted on the Web, as a report.

"It appears they use their website to collect and analyse reactions, as an input to the European Union policy-making process."