What can India learn from NASA?

An interview with Prof. Bharat Bhasker, Professor of Information Technology & Systems at IIM Lucknow, who in addition, as a principal investigator, is responsible for setting up Internet Commerce Research Center in IIM Lucknow, and has worked at NASA for seven years as Group Manager, Hughes STX Inc, 4400 Forbes Blvd., Lanham, MD 20706 at Goddard Space Flight Centre of NASA. He has to his credit notable work in areas like E-commerce, Information Security Budgets, distributed & parallel DBMS etc.

Can you share some takeaways from your project on ‘Management of Information Security on Shoestring Budgets’ for CIOs, specially in today’s context?

Security is definitely a very important area, but 45 to 50 per cent itself goes for license shopping and rest in maintenance and operations. Many security solutions area available in public domain though and rather than buying a license firewall or intrusion detection system, one cane explore other options. But yes, you have to be educated enough about good OS (Open Source) solutions. You have to tell your security service provider about this direction. Initially, they may have some hitch but it can be worked out.

We have implemented an OS here and thankfully we could take bigger risks at IIM-L and with that 40 to 60 per cent cost savings were possible.

What is it like to be a quasi CIO, in the functional sense, for an academic organisation?

We have been leaders in operating internal IT and have been scaling up to support a growing staff. From administrative affairs, course management, to account management or fee management, is being taken care by IT and that is great because there are no incremental costs with the rise in numbers. Today, we area ready and on course to a completely integrated ERP arena and would roll it out in a year or so.

You have been doing some interesting novel research in the realm of electronic commerce. Can you share some highlights specially in context to the current industry dynamics?

Many new research areas are being explored. Like recommendation system in E-commerce. The first phase started around 2000 and the industry has already been affected by it. The second phase is more sophisticated. It’s about competitive advantage and how it can be used in the business context. Based on past experiences, personalised systems are happening now.

There is also another remarkable area which is of negotiations in this field. It deals with best VFM (Value for Money) for the sites one visits and how majority of consumer products and the related negotiation parts get automated.

Can these developments redefine CRM interface points too?

Most of these technologies are evolution of CRM only and are based on what a customer was buying in the past. It can also relate to the likely problems one will face with different kinds of products and the use of data mining therein.

But how easy is it actually to personalize customer interfaces?

It requires use of behaviour patterns, user to user segmentation, item to item segmentation, analytics etc, and even then it comes to 50 to 70 per cent accuracy.

What other possible areas of applications can this approach have?

Lot of them actually, from credit card defaulter management, or stock market apps to target marketing around promotions or predictive cost cutting on targets.

You had a fairly strong stint at NASA earlier. Any observations on what exactly stretches the gap between NASA and its Indian counterparts and what can be learnt from the former entity?

Well they have a wonderful model which is great specially because of continuous improvement in data and power. They hire people, roll out projects for contract-based research and let a huge spectrum innovate on many areas, irrespective of what makes sense immediately or not. They don’t hide technology and they are in public domain.

Except for superior or sensitive work, most research pieces are shared. They can take it to next level or generation, like Dbase2, and hence there is a lot of proliferation of next-generation technologies. Ex- Google maps couldn’t have done what it has achievso fast and so comprehensively without NASA’s help, specially in the first go.

Anything specific on the progress around high-performance computing?

Prior to 2000, there was an acute need of huge processing power and with 500 or more processors working in parallel that was made available in US research labs. From 2000 onwards, computing has become more of a commodity. Example- massively parallel architecture, Google’s Blade Architecture or IBM and HP’s strides in this area.