Page 188 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Unit 14: Future Trends in Organization Development

Notes
the extraordinary good work that the Department of Electronics has been able to do in the
last few years, a majority of the Fortune 500 companies and the well-known companies in
Europe and Japan have come to recognize India as the country of their choice for the
software development and maintenance. What that means is that they want us to do things
which are more than ordinary. There are several examples where we have been asked to
complete projects in a period of three to five months, when it could have taken perhaps
twelve to eighteen months in the normal circumstances.

Thanks to fierce under cuttings in prices, we are all under tremendous pressure to slash
costs, and yet at the same time to improve our quality. If we need to do this, there are
actually two instruments which we have with us. One is to improve productivity and the
second of course is to cut down our overhead charges. We obviously have to invest in
world class technology. We have to replicate those technologies in India so that our
customers feel comfortable, our employees feel comfortable and at the end of the day we
are in a position to complete products to the satisfaction of our customers.

The Supreme Challenge
To sum up the challenge of our industry: it is how do you attract, enable, empower and
retain the best professionals. That is our challenge. A corollary of that would be how do
you acquire, enhance and retain the organizational learning, wisdom and experience, so
that the organization can go from strength to strength. Another corollary of it is that there
is tremendous attrition in the industry because every young man or girl wants to go to the
promised land of their calling which is the United States of America. For our youngsters
we need to look at how we can in the shortest possible time convert a green horn
programmer or an analyst to a successful project manager. So if you look at it, there are
these three strategic imperatives that we in the software industry have to tackle in the
coming years as we have been doing in the past.

These are obviously multiple instruments. By and large we have tried to use electronic
media, in conjunction with computers for all of our systems. I would say all major systems
are available at the desktop. I don't want to get into the number of appraisal systems that
we have. We have got a manpower system, also financial systems, quality systems, etc.
But let me just go into two or three things that we have done this year in the recent past.
Intranet
The first one is, of course, intranet, first imperative was how do you acquire organizational
learning, wisdom and experience. What we have done is we have installed a 1400 node
intranet which spans the entire organization across three continents and about six
development centres in India and perhaps about seven or eight support and marketing
centres outside. This is Netscape based and this provides desktop facilities of information
at the finger tips. The importance of intranet is the fact that it is a repository of our quality
system documentation and it is a repository of our electronic body of knowledge. It is a
repository of all institutional rules and regulations. It has a platform where all our
youngsters can put their photographs, their hobbies, their interests, etc. and communicate
with all other people. It has also a repository of organizational data of importance, data
like quality defects, metrics, etc. This is extremely important for us in our quest to improve
quality and to enhance productivity. Now riding on this we have a concept of electronic
body of knowledge. The concept itself is about six years old. What we have done is
whenever we come to grips with a new situation, whenever we do something new in a
particular country, whether welcoming a new employee, whether starting a new
development or getting into a new technology, we write down the do's and don'ts, the
tricks to use and the tricks to avoid in respect of particular transactions and we put it in a
Contd...

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