Govt Files and the question of being 'Saksham'

BANGALORE: This remark is more than a strong Shekhar Kapur opinion on a recent ‘accident’. It might start adorning many sales pitch slides as we see e-governance solutions spreading like a fire. But are these flames blazing only in the terrain of vendors. Why should the torchbearers in the terrain of government segment of customers be even bothered about new fire alarms of automation? We try to light some small wicks of questions along this big stair-case called e-governance as we chat with Sarv Saravanan, Senior Vice President & Managing Director, EMC Centers of Excellence — India and Egypt, about their new solution — Saksham.

Tell us the idea behind this new offering?

Back offices in government vertical go through a lot of paper work and workflows. It is a cumbersome process for government organizations. There’s a lot of digitization and computerization happening, but all that is a drop in the ocean. Nowadays, government organizations face a lot of internal and external pressure to becoming more efficient, whether it is to control deficit or to have better financial planning or any other reason. Anyone who depends on government, be it a business entity or an individual, wants government to become much more efficient. Even new regulations like the RTI Act expect the transparency quotient to rise. So a lot of drivers are there.

What exactly have you picked as the area to pursue?

Information gets in government departments in different formats, silos and locations, which are often not structured. That’s the problem space we found worth chasing. That is, where we can bring a good solution in an accelerated fashion. It is better, easily configurable, easy to deploy and with faster Time to Market degrees. Saksham is a product-based solution and best suited for back office product suites.

Is it easy and usable for the people on the desks attuned to the erstwhile systems for so many years?

The product takes care of imbibing a lot of familiarity to users. There’s not much change that anyone would face. The whole interface looks the same and that’s why training and security parts are also handled easily. More than that, it is future-proof as whenever the process might change in the long-term, the changes are much easier to manage and extend further with computerized files. Everything is out of the box. The product has drag-and-drop functionalities with very little custom development requirements.

It’s a part of your workflow basket?

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Yes. Based on extensive feedback from members of Indian government agencies who described the government workflow and their needs for a better solution for case management, engineers from EMC’s India Center of Excellence designed a workflow solution from the ground-up called ‘Saksham’, specifically to the needs of government departments and agencies in India. The solution is a simple workflow that automates case management and file tracking, reducing process time and accelerating workflow. It enables secure authentication, provides users the ability to initiate, review, and approve any case from anywhere. The solution eliminates errors and misuse of the system by keeping audit logs that track all parts of case file movements thus ensuring transparency, and allows adherence to information governance best practices to ensure compliance and enforce retention policies.This solution can be leveraged to commonwealth countries as well which use similar workflow processes in their systems.

How is it any different from other solutions available in this space?

It is first of its kind. It is focused on government sector. Every government process has chances of being time-bound, approval-dependent, error-prone, hooked at different touch points and being paper-intensive. We anticipate this curve and reduce time and paper-based filing issues. The Whitehall process of filing is addressed here. We can not change the process so we have tried to automate certain parts of it with best efficiency and results.

Would it take care of connecting backward and forward to other pieces in the given process?

Yes, we understand that government processes are a sensitive area. So it’s a seamless piece with capabilities of archival and referencing or for compliance parts etc.

But why just automate the process? As often happens in BPM (Business Process Management) and workflow products, why not re-engineer the process? Any possibility?

Re-engineering is out of technology’s purview per se. Technology is an application that works through automation and digitization. But it does allow you to think about the whole area in a different way. Depending on how conservative one is, changes can happen. Customers today have at least adopted the notion of automation.

Manpower-related concerns are often interlinked with any automation product. Does it affect its adoption in the market?

It is a familiar-looking product which is easy to train and easy to use. In any digitization effort, we all know and accept the certain degree of skepticism that is bound to be there. It is not a question about this solution only. But more about the pressure at government’s end. Yet, this product delivers a good bang for the buck. That’s where it hits the bull’s eye, as it also makes things easy for users.

How loud is this bang? Have you started getting customers? What’s a typical TCO level here?

In terms of reaping the investment, 30 to 50 per cent efficiency levels is what this solution pursues. It’s a license-based product and the degree of investment varies as per size, scale and number of users. We are currently having a lot of opportunities in our pipeline. We are also talking to a large PSU and the deployment will happen anytime now.

With Synplicity’s acquisition, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trends and other changes in BPM market, how’s EMC’s portfolio evolving further?

All our products are getting cloud-enabled. All tools, applications etc should be inherently architectured for cloud and devices. All tools are natively supported for new platforms. Lot of work is happening on user interfaces, support and consumerisation areas in IT. EMC will keep evolving like it did from a storage to infrastructure company to virtualization to current games like big data as cloud computing. We have and will sustain a very powerful portfolio at EMC. In fact, EMC has very recently introduced its largest-ever wave of new transformative products and technologies with 42 products launched with a focus on hybrid cloud.