'Techies have no space for knowledge enrichment'

It is believed and practiced world over that knowledge would be worthless if it’s not shared with others and the sharing adds more value to that knowledge.

Last week, the Computer Society of India (CSI), the organization of computer professionals, and British Computer Society (BCS) - The Chartered Institute for IT, inked a memorandum of understanding in the areas of expanding organizational memberships, sharing of knowledge, resources and development of professionals.

On this start of a new partnership, CSI President S. Mahalingam, who is also the executive director and CFO of Tata Consultancy Services, talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about the MoU’s objective and benefits, its future impact on Indian IT professionals and education and the issues faced by IT professionals in today’s time. Excerpts:

Recently, the Computer Society of India and British Computer Society - The Chartered Institute for IT, signed a memorandum of understanding. So can you explain the objective of the MoU between CSI and BCS?

The MoU will help to build a relationship between the two organizations - CSI and BCS. It will allow any Indian member of CSI to get membership of BCS at a discounted membership fee and the same stands for the BCS members as they can also get membership of CSI.

From CSI perspective, it allows our members the access to technological information, magazines, publications and resources. This will allow the two organizations and its members to work closely and get access to various benefits such as publications and other educational and career programs with course materials and tools.

Even from BCS perspective, they also want to have international members from other computer societies like CSI. And for other countries, there’s a need to learn from India, particularly the kind of things we have done in some areas like the e-governance projects at the grassroot and state level, which is exemplary and low cost.

So, they also want to gain benefits from us as we have such a large IT professional base here. Also, there are some areas where we have done tremendous amount of work, for instance software processes, outsourcing, e-governance and a few others. Many of Indian organizations are having CMMi5 level certifications. That getting such a certification involves lots of efforts and processes makes the certified organizations much more efficient and less erroneous. So they would like to have benefits from such information, knowledge and experience.

What kind of future impacts will this partnership between CSI and BCS have on Indian IT professionals?

For CSI, the main thing is professional development of individuals. It comes in two ways, one is that as a professional you constantly need to improve yourself in technical knowledge because working on any development platform requires that.

And secondly, how I keep people updated on latest technologies such as cloud computing is very critical because our knowledge otherwise from college to organizations remains same and we don’t move much in new areas and higher levels.

So, we want to have accreditation or certification of educational courses or programs given by CSI that will be very important for the IT professionals and will motivate them. CSI’s aim is how to develop professionals and make them relevant IT professionals in today’s time.

As a president of CSI, how do you want to take this partnership at the education and knowledge sharing point for the professionals?

We, CSI and BCS, already have a very active rejuvenation of our common education thing and we really want to offer much more programs that are in the knowledge benefit system which the members can access. At the first level, I will try to do something at the course level and then will try to promote the joint membership program as it will have great benefits at international level between the professionals of two counties.

Today, as you said, India has high number of IT professionals. So can you tell us about the key issues faced by IT professionals and their development?

There’s no scope or space available for IT professionals for enrichment of knowledge and research. But it should not be the case as they should be provided space to enhance their knowledge and skills. IT professionals need to have the latest knowledge about new developments and technologies, otherwise they will find themselves redundant if they are unable to adapt to new technologies and upgrade their knowledge.

Ten years back when COBOL went out of fashion, many of my own friends in the industry who had come from the COBOL route, were absolutely threatened. However, since they were thorough professionals, they could adapt to the changes.

You know today, if you go to an IT professional in any organization and ask him, he will tell you the biggest problem for him is insecurity as there are so many things happening around. I will be more insecure unless I know what is happening around. For instance, I do read Dataquest to keep myself updated on the areas that are developing. So, you need to keep updated about the things happening around as the world is changing