Interviews

Sudhir Rao, Client Service Principal, TSG, HP India

by VARINDIA 2010-03-12

HP braces up e-Governance Initiatives

In an age where private companies make it easy for consumers to shop, manage accounts and request services online, people now expect the same from their governments. Internet-savvy citizens want their governments to act more like businesses, and governments around the globe are rising to the challenge. Based on best practices learned from around the world, the HP India e-Government Framework is a portfolio of people, processes and technologies that can help government agencies serve their citizens better. Sudhir Rao, Client Service Principal, TSG, HP India tells, us more about the company’s e-governance initiatives.

Brief us about HP’s e-governance initiatives?

HP has a strong continual relationship with the government for the last 4–5 years. HP’s uniqueness, domain expertise and value-add helped create an IP around its e-Governance initiatives which can be further customized for the benefit of the customer. HP has decided to go with open-source as a product line and developed a few core applications based on these components. Fortunately, HP had an open-source framework already available that helped in standardizing some of the products on Industry Standard Servers and virtualization to ensure capacity and efficient use. Based on open standards, we started off with the Government of Karnataka, Government of Maharastra and Department of Income Tax, to name a few. These are some of the areas we started with and have been executing well.

What are the services that HP provides in the government projects?
HP has multiple projects with the government across different verticals in the country. Some of them include enabling an e-procurement platform for the Government of Karnataka and developing a Healthcare Information System for the Government of Maharashtra. Likewise, for the Department of Income tax, HP is enabling an online filing of returns. Additionally, HP is also involved with universities to create digital libraries for archiving of documents in Uttarakhand. These are the areas where HP has delivered and achieved success.

HP has an excellent track record in the above projects that are key to the government. HP has capabilities and experience to build complex applications like the e-procurement software. The company also has developed expertise in building an efficient IT infrastructure, project management, system development of application, training, help-desk and consequently change management. HP with its best practises has added value to Government through these projects wherein HP has dealt with complex issues like managing change.

How does HP go about handling e-governance projects?
E-Governance projects, by nature, are very complex with multiple interfaces like the government on the one side and government users, general public and others on the other. Mostly, there are multiple stakeholders in any given project. To manage the complexity, over the period, HP internally has developed and mastered a strong review and process for all such large projects. We ensure to deploy our best resources to work with the government with specialized skill sets. The company also conducts a lot of seminars and workshops to build awareness, to increase adoption rate. It is a combination of processes as well as user awareness with good training programmes that adds value to our programmes. All these factors help us in the success of our projects and also ensure effective completion.

Which are the projects that HP is actively involved in?
Department of Income tax, NIC, Healthcare – Health Information Management System and Government of Karnataka e-governance.

Emphasize some of the states where HP has executed excellent job?Karnataka, Uttarakhand – DIT, Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra.

What kind of resources HP has for the government projects?
HP leverages a combination of Project teams, Technology teams and Domain teams. The technology team enables technology and the Domain team defines the processes. Success of e-governance projects lies in not implementing the current manual process electronically but to re-engineer the business process so that technology enables the same to make it more efficient to various stakeholders.

Does it involve its partner ecosystem to integrate solutions or does it independently?
HP is a technology company and is an expert in executing multi-year and complex projects. When a project involves grounds-up change, we involve partners. The re-engineering process is generally done independently. Typically, partners are involved in projects from a domain expertise perspective. Once the project rolls out, we take on training as well. HP with its partners has successfully done lots of projects within India and across countries like Hong Kong, Australia and Singapore.