SPIN Pune Seminar: Will blackbox governance yield quality October 29, 2009

I am pleased to inform you that none other than the award-winning CIO of Pune City, Dr. Anupam Saraph, has kindly agreed to speak at this program, on the IT quality issues in the e-Governance domain.



Topic: Will black-box governance yield quality?



From Electronic Voting Machines, web-portals, registries for people and businesses, GIS records to e-payment facilities there are tens of thousands of e-governance initiatives at the local, state and national levels. The citizens expect that these applications deliver consistent, highly available, highly usable, reliable and above all very trustable solutions.



e-governance solutions exist in different environments, non-standard, ad-hoc, highly redundant, multi-actor and multi-intervention processes that are deeply authority centric. These processes and their e-governance solutions have almost no clarity about the purpose and the key elements requiring audit-trails, validations, authentications, privacy or security.



Naturally, e-governance is a mine-field for quality issues. Independent or third party quality assurance is not yet a standard practice in e-governance projects. Outsourcing functional tests of use cases, integration tests of changed contexts and diverse components that may coexist and tests for performance, scalability, usability, reliability, supportability and even version control are, as yet, rare in e-governance projects. The purposes, time-lines, processes, functions, contexts, integration of e-governance applications are rarely part of specification. Whenever they are, they rarely match the production environment and contexts.



Occasionally the quality issues throw open huge issues for the country at large – the issues surrounding the millions of EVM’s, the absence of voter receipts and the un-auditable voting process is one example of such a colossal nation-wide quality failure.



Several quality failures surround the various government registries and registry programs. Quality issues exist in government payment channels, tendering and e-procurements, government records of its business, and also in the web presence of most government offices.



Can we launch a quality revolution to address the huge need to usher in better e-governance across the country?



Speaker : Dr. Anupam Saraph, CIO- Pune City



Anupam Saraph is a renowned IT and governance expert, an accomplished innovator, a systems thinker and an Advisor to top leaders across the world. He is known for pioneering and implementing crowd-sourced governance across the world and is particularly acclaimed for creating the world’s first governance wiki at http://giki.wikia.com.



Dr Saraph has helped leaders and teams to build remarkable performance, implement innovative projects and create enduring value. As an Independent Director on various company boards and as Vice Chairman of a public sector organization Dr Saraph has helped identify value, evolve strategies to build value and pursue missions successfully.



Dr Saraph is also a life student of the roles of people and systems in driving change and a street-artist at capturing mental models of change for design, strategy and building enduring value. A global citizen, he loves traveling and exploring different cultures and people across the world. Dr Saraph currently advises various Businesses and Governments in India, has initiated a nation-wide agenda on democratic reform and also serves as the CIO Pune City. In his role as the CIO, Pune City he has enabled innovative projects and received the CIO 100 Award for 2008.

This event is free for all to attend. RSVP: Anand Prakash Shukla
SPIN Coordinator
Tel: 020-30012189(Dir)
Mob: +91-9822927606