Reconstruction of IT

By Omer Bin Ahsan

Technology is happening, it will continue to shape the way we do business in the future. The evolution of society, concepts and sciences is unstoppable; such is the ability of thinking creatures. However thought precedes action and the bane of Pakistan’s IT growth is action preceded thought. Our successes are few and far between but the potential is enormous. The vision is beautiful but the foundations are weak, unbalanced and unprepared to control the weight of the potential growth.
What insights have you applied? Did it really drive anything beyond an MIS that replaced the daily register? Administrative Time reduction, Business Performance Improvement, Citizen Service, Public Access and Cutting Edge Technology, Exports increase in percentage, industry increases volume, software houses opening up, IT parks inaugurated and seminars to boast it all.
Special initiative for special interests taken by special people in their bid to make special profits is the guiding principle overriding the love for technology, research, scientific evolution, social enablement, and national administrative improvement. Despite our love for technology and its impact major technological decisions and improvements are done at the behest of business necessity and growth or military enterprise.  But let us not be so proletariat in our perception of reality, facts will remain facts and will never change. What changes is how you use these facts to the benefit of greater goals.

Utopia is not just a myth or a novel by Thomas Moore; it is not the final solution, but rather the pursuit of one. The process of achieving perfection, reaching a solution or reaching a goal is our Utopia.

Reconstruction of IT in Pakistan is not a summing up of quantifiable objectives to increase the tele-density, number of PHD’s or e-government project budgets; but rather it is the reconstruction of mindset with which national objectives must be met. The mindset of planning, foundation strengthening, action, optimization and the trust in our abilities to outdo our Utopia each year.
In this reexamination of mindsets and objectives let us first expedite what we are doing. Information Engineered to drive planning and execution by leveraging technology; this concept is simple yet filled with complexities that lie in its actualization and utility especially in an environment where education, technology appreciation and the general will to make it reach its logical end is lacking. However, the utopian concept exists as the goal to be sought in the idea of a technology enabled environment for planning, monitoring and executing government and business functions. A connected and transformational environment to make change and grow wherein technology becomes more than a tool but rather the will to reach an end.
While we are already talking about such an enablement and perhaps working on it in Pakistan but the moves are too disparate, too disconnected, too independent and too fashionable. Any infrastructural development in IT in Pakistan ignores the holistic picture of technology enablement that helps in connecting everything together while still being able to drive change. A bottom up movement for connecting the silos that have been created and then orchestrating change at the top to monitor and improve performance.  Unfortunately IT enablement has been reduced to fashionable adaptations lacking the foresight for things to come and a commitment to effectuate it for its real purpose. This is not only the bane in the Public Sector but also in the Private Sector where indigenous industry still refrains from IT enablement due to lack of trust in change.
Far from becoming an IT Dystopia where IT enablement reaches a point where it turns into a Big Brother much like Terry Gilliams’s Brazil that turns into a decaying drone like world, we still lack the fundamentals to reach such a unison of systems and concepts under one idea that is agile enough to deal with the future and current needs. The problem lies in the fact that there is no joint search for Utopia, maybe in that search we might reach a Heterotopias with real and achievable possibilities one being cyberspace which seemed a distant Utopia at some point and now it’s a living reality that we rely on each day.
Therefore, in order to move from inspiration and rhetoric to blunt facts let us aim for Utopia and perhaps somewhere in that journey we might reach a heterotopias. How we do that is to analyze and interpret the opportunity that lies ahead, the vision that we seek to accomplish and an assessment of our potential. The time is for us to group up as experts using national pride as a weapon and a conviction towards Utopia to plan and engage in a congress that assesses the unflattering truths about ourselves. In lieu of the ongoing political drama it gives us space to come out with the utopian proposition until a serious will and money from the government is seen for the transformation that IT enablement can bring.
The opportunity window appears in the appearance of the technology friendly breed into decision making. Those born in late 70’s have had the opportunity to get oriented with the web lifestyle where they have learned to appreciate information, interacting with forms and communication. This allows them to understand and respect how technology driven business solution enable business performance improvement. A five year plan at this point of time will be well placed since in the next 5 years business drivers would be people familiar with the web lifestyle, thus an expansion in IT budgets both in public and private sector will occur. The inertia that IT creates in any sector it enables is so strong that irrespective of the setbacks decision makers will still drive business through information that needs to be enabled through technology.

Young public servants familiar with the web lifestyle are more appreciative of concepts of E-Services and ready to adopt them into their practices. Right now is the time to make and plan change and then five years of dedicated hard work to reach our national utopia, where vendors need to enable business and government more than just getting payments out and customers need to be more appreciative of the value of IT enablement so that it meets its objectives. A plan regulated by a national IT policy developed jointly by the Government, Experts and Private Sector. A policy that institutes a regulatory authority that helps public and private sector through the challenges of legislative inertia, Intellectual Property Rights, Piracy, Procurement Regulations, Conflict Arbitration and Litigation. This function helps to outflank the road blocks of legislation blocking business process re-engineering and becomes an authority that can be trusted by both Government and Private Vendors to engage in projects together without being extorted or fooled by the other side.
The 5 year program must invoke research, thought, congress, public policy advocacy and career development within the program. A program managed by absolute conviction to the application of our joint insight and vision backed up by research. Transformational IT can never come into place without a transformational mind, before enacting our 5 years of measurable objectives in reaching a Utopia let us first restructure our mindset in believing in one. Any gauge of Applied Insight shall be a measure of how far are we from our national utopia. Ironically I heard a popular evangelist said transformational connected government is not possible yet an Indian came to Pakistan and said lead by example. The hope is in our potential and realization, still there is a CEO reading social writers to study social psychology to enable himself in his applied insight.