Computers Today, November 1-15, 2000; The Net; Arjun Malhotra Column

Arjun Malhotra There is an old saying: "What got you there isn't good enough to keep you there". This holds true for most things in business and especially the IT industry. We have been extremely successful in building world-class development capabilities, making our IT industry one of the most successful ventures in Indian business. The Y2K crisis only added fuel to the success by driving demand for IT professionals and providing the economic foundation from which we have launched the next generation of IT-the "Internet Technology" boom. But it is not business as usual. With the opportunities the Internet brings us, comes challenge -IT development must respond to the new Internet paradigm.

The Net is opening many doors to competition and market expansion, lowering the cost of businesses, new customer relationship management which is feeding a race by firms to get their fastest. This is putting incredible demands on IT to respond faster than ever before.

Traditional Development

Traditionally, development has been laid out along well-established delivery models that have served us well. The concept being to collect specifications from the client-usually sending someone to the client site for three or four weeks collecting the requirements and gaining agreement on what would be delivered. The specification was then taken back to development teams to be completed.

The scope of the projects lent themselves to six months or longer with many development projects taking a year. However, "Internet time" does not provide us the luxury of this type of process or time, it demands things be done quickly with a new, highly interactive process.

The Net Model

Some of the key features of the Internet model are:

Clients do not always know what they want until they see it.

Requires developer to provide more investigative consulting.

The walls between development and the client come down and interaction is much greater.

There is much greater leeway in the design phase. The prototype is now the interactive proof-of-concept and a sales tool for creating a final agreed upon design and specification.

The Internet itself is a highly interactive tool between the development team and the client to finalise requirements and specifications. Through iteration, prototypes generally become the final product.

More structured components of the development process are eliminated and the entire process is redefined into a new "Digital Delivery" process.

Time has compressed the interaction substantially... months are turned into weeks... weeks become days.

Role of a Consultant

In the new age of digital delivery, the role of the consultant is more interactive and more consultative than pure development, with digital consultants needing to have good communication skills and the ability to interact with clients.

The traditional IT development model is top down with little emphasis on new technologies. The digital delivery model forces collaboration and the need to constantly review evolving technology. Never before has IT needed a collaborative strategy more, one that builds iteratively within the development teams and externally with external technology. The time pressures does not allow the luxury of building distinct solutions for each client.

An approach that worked even a few months, may not be true anymore. Digital delivery is replacing traditional IT development and development projects are much more dynamic. Today's IT firms must support a culture of open interaction and a culture of collaboration.

The writer is co-founder, the HCL Group, and now Chairman, TechSpan Inc.

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