Information Systems

Debates, Applications and Impacts

Priya Seetharaman,Jocelyn Cranefield

• Verlag: Routledge India
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429514951
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Sociology

This book captures a range of important developments that have occurred in Information Systems over the last forty years, with a particular focus on India and the developing world. Over this time, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Information Systems (IS) have come to play a critical role in supporting, complementing and automating managerial decisions, shaping and transforming industries, and contributing to deep societal and economic change. This volume examines a range of topics for those interested in the adoption and use of these technologies across varied situations. It combines empirical studies on the application and impact of IS with commentaries, debates and insights on the transformative role that IT and the IT industry have played, and continue to play, within India as well as globally.

The book draws attention to issues and challenges that organizations grapple with in tech-enabled environments, and provides insights on the role of automation and computational techniques. It explores the global impact of the technology revolution on economic growth and development, electronic globalization, and the wider opportunities and challenges of a hi-tech world. The chapters cover various themes such as e-government in India, internet-based distribution systems, internet banking, and use of collaborative IT tools and functions to support virtual teams in the software industry and the business process outsourcing industry. Other chapters focus on methodological advances, such as systems thinking which finds applications in organizational decision-making, and the use of fuzzy logic.

This volume will interest professionals and scholars of information technology and information systems, computer studies, IT systems, economics, and business and management studies.

1 Information systems in India

Dare to cross

Priya Seetharaman and Jocelyn Cranefield

Introduction

The discipline of management is innately pluralistic. Of the different disciplines which are considered to be integral part of such pluralism, information systems is often viewed as a young and derived discipline (King and Lyytinen, 2004; Wade et al., 2006). Two outcomes of being treated so have been intense debates – identifying ‘reference disciplines for information systems’ (Keen, 1980; Avgerou, 2000 and Saunders in King et al., 2010) and along with it the deep ‘identity crisis’ ruminations, linked with calls for a distinctive theoretical foundation (Benbasat and Zmud, 2003; King and Lyytinen, 2004; Teo and Srivastava, 2007). These debates have left their mark on the evolution of information systems as an academic discipline in the global context as well as regional contexts. Given the burgeoning demand for and use of information technology (IT), one could ask, should there be a distinction between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ in the discipline? Should we be distinguishing the larger issues related to individual and organizational use of information technology as generic to individuals and organizations across the world or should we emphasize the need to focus on the context – the ‘local’? Should the issues of interest in information systems as a discipline and the manner in which we approach these issues of interest, the questions we ask and the answers we seek, be guided by the relative importance of these in the context of study? Such distinction may not only be incidental from the disparity in the socio-economic and institutional contexts in which such information technology is embedded but is also imperative given the consequential potential impacts – planned or unintended.

These two issues also impose upon information systems academics practical ‘everyday-life’ challenges exaggerated by the pressures for academic performance, sometimes leaving us to compete for resources with other management disciplines, many of which have, in earlier times, been looked upon as parent disciplines to information systems. Although the issue of reference disciplines has now been relegated to the status of purely an academic discussion, concerns relating to identity seem to have larger implications and therefore continue to dominate disciplinary discourses. Identity-related issues in the discipline present us with a need to consciously address the dual challenges of boundary-setting and ensuring inclusiveness in the knowledge creation, demonstration and dissemination activities that information systems academicians engage in. Sporadic appearance of articles in information systems journals and conference proceedings on such themes as falling enrolments, shrinking budgets and academic job losses add to the imperative to ensure that the field’s boundaries are sufficiently inclusive. If the information systems academia of the developed West is grappling with these issues, can that of the developing South be far behind? However, owing to South Asia and Asia-Pacific being the outsourcing destination for IT-related and IT-enabled work from the developed West, the nature of the identity debate is quite different; the potential solutions that can be explored by the information systems academic community in these geographic spaces are, by extension, distinct. An attempt to understand the prospects for the information systems discipline in India has to necessarily be accompanied by tracing the historical context in which the discipline established its roots; the role played by the different stakeholders including the IT industry, the technical and higher education institutions, and the government; the discipline’s evolving academic coordinates and finally the growing business interest in digitalization.

The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. We prepare the canvas by briefly scrolling through the history of the information technology industry in India. Much has been said and written about the IT industry in India through multiple perspectives and theoretical lenses. We therefore restrict ourselves to viewing the industry’s evolution with the specific objective of comprehending its impact on information systems as an academic discipline. We then discuss the role played by the information systems academia in India through their contribution to the Indian industry, specifically the IT industry.

We conclude the chapter with our perspective on how information systems as a discipline, more so in a developing country context such as India, should dare to cross the disciplinary boundaries laid down thus far. Here, we are reiterating the thought and desire expressed by many leading information systems researchers such as Robert D. Galliers, who emphasized the need to adopt a transdisciplinary approach to IS research (Galliers, 2003). Although Galliers distinguishes interdisciplinary from transdisciplinary, we believe both are equally valuable in taking us beyond the confines of the boundaries already in place. Interdisciplinarity refers to “pooling different disciplinary resources to produce a single outcome” or “drawing on several disciplinary practices” to create new streams of thought; while transdisciplinarity is seen

to hold on to both the specificity of particular ways of thinking and knowing that define disciplines, while [simultaneously] creating the space of their productive encounter so that a different kind of knowledge emerges in the act of intersection and traverse of varied fields through which a shared concept might travel.

(Pollock, 2007)

Our academic rationale for such a wake-up call to researchers in the information systems discipline, especially in developing countries like India, is two-fold. First, we argue that in socio-economic environments characterized by chaos such as that in India, pigeonholing issues surrounding information technology blinkers out deeper challenges that demand far greater attention, resulting in the loss of potentially viable solutions to fundamental problems prevalent in practice. Second, amongst the various fields of study and practice in management, information systems is best posed to play an integrative role drawing from different functional management disciplines such as behavioural science, finance and marketing, while at the same adapting theories and perspectives from other related social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, political science and economics. By attempting to cross disciplinary boundaries, the information systems academia shall be mimicking the ethereal, all-permeating nature of its primary resource – ‘information’.

1.1 Information technology industry in India

The beginnings of the IT industry in India can be traced back to as early as the 1960s when the then central government set up technical higher education institutions with the distinct objective of being able to ensure the availability of trained indigenous human capital and knowledge resources. However, the 1960s and subsequently the 1970s held mixed experiences for India in the context of its IT industry. The dependency on international technology providers and the tendency of some foreign firms to dump obsolete equipment and charge for technology support services higher than in the US did not augur well with the Indian scientists and policy-makers (Subramanian, 2006). Coupled with the intense restrictions placed by the government policies of the 70s, which emphasized license-based business regimes, export quotas and foreign exchange restrictions, the growth of the industry was further pushed back. Many of these policies were designed for the manufacturing sector but partly applied to the IT industry (Balakrishnan, 2006; Subramanian, 2006; Das and Sagara, 2017). This effort to promote self-reliance in manufacturing computer technology through stringent policies till the 1980s constrained both technology makers and users, restricting their access to financial capital (such as foreign direct investment in export-oriented units) as well as knowledge capital (Das and Sagara, 2017). Adding to this indifference, a long pending need to declare software as an “industry” continued to make it difficult for firms wishing to ‘make, sell or export’ software to seek financial support (Dossani, 2006). A shift in the government policies in the 1980s brought with it some promise of growth and opportunity for the industry, albeit in a slow and delayed fashion. The global shift towards the separation of computer software from hardware, which in turn gave an impetus to the growth of the software and the IT services industry worldwide, helped India best utilize its dominant source of competitive advantage – human resources.

The early offering of the Indian IT services industry was, therefore, the provision of low-cost programming as a service to clients abroad as early as the mid-1980s (Yourdon, 1993; Dossani, 2005). Although managed services, time-sharing, integration and maintenance were the earliest software services to be outsourced by American user firms, these did not lend themselves to remote work. These were generally short-term assignments for international clients, often at the client’s own geographic location, fulfilling a particular project need (Balakrishnan, 2011). As application development in some of the developed countries, especially the US, became increasingly decentralized, the Indian software companies saw huge business potential in providing these as services at a cost lower than that of their American counterparts.

Growth came gradually to the industry in the 80s when knowledge workers, especially technically qualified, English-speaking Indian engineers, became more readily available to the growing global industry at an economical cost. The industry registered a high growth rate (in terms of sales revenue) in the first decade of its formal existence. It exported around $25 million worth of software and related services in 1985 (Kapur, 2002), which grew to around $105 million by 1990, and reached approximately $6.2 billion by the year 2000 (Dossani, 2005). Critics argue that a combination of “benign neglect” on the part of the Indian government (Kattuman and Iyer, 2003) coupled with extraordinary entrepreneurship (Dossani, 2005) and the intense branding by industry associations like NASSCOM (Athreye and Chaturvedi, 2007) played significant roles in the rapid growth of the industry.

Further, till the early 1980s, the industry also experienced a gaping deficiency in technical knowledge. Much of the skills, knowledge and experience available in the industry till then was actually brought back by software professionals returning home after stints abroad (Balakrishnan, 2011). Deliberate attempts to foster the growth of the IT industry in India came subsequently in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Indian government set up software technology parks and clusters (Vaidyanathan, 2008), through to the late 1990s, when foreign ownership in the industry was permitted and protection for software as intellectual property was introduced (Seshagiri, 1999; Dossani, 2006). Development of telecommunication infrastructure, creation of associations and consortia (such as NASSCOM), and a growing supportive and powerful diaspora were also seen to influence the gradual success of the Indian IT industry (Lee et al., 2014).

India’s success as a software exporter among developing countries has often been attributed to the three-stage ‘body shopping – offshoring – global delivery model’ (Lee et al., 2014; Pinjala, 2017). The shift from the pure body-shopping environments of the 80s to the global services delivery model in the 1990s allowed Indian IT firms to equip themselves with far greater project management capabilities, rich enough to sustain them through the early 2000s (Athreye, 2005). With the growth of the internet and networked business environments, new opportunities presented themselves to the Indian IT firms. While many large firms utilized this opportunity to grow in revenue by capitalizing on the possibility of remote work, offshoring and extension outsourcing, these new environments also spawned a variety of smaller firms with quite different business models – a phenomenon that sowed the seeds of the early start-up ecosystem in India, much akin to that prevalent in some of the more developed countries. However, the changing landscape also demanded a shift in the orientation of the business environment, including the need to encourage risk-taking and innovation, the tolerance and patience demanded from investors, end-customers who were technology-savvy and business customers who were willing to co-create and experiment with relatively unknown technology providers. While some start-ups barely survived, most failed. While start-up failure is common at a global level, the likelihood of failure in this case can also be seen as related to the nascence of the ecosystem in the Indian market reflected in the shifting dynamics of the internet service provider industry (Rao, 2000), the low internet penetration, lack of trust of technology and deficient infrastructural support (Ernst & Young, 2013). Technology too needed time to stabilize and garner steam to provide a critical mass of potential adopters.

The first decade of the millennium turned the tables when more user-friendly, democratized, less-expensive technology devices, tools and applications appeared on the horizon. End-consumers’ expectations rose, which in-turn triggered a rise in the performance expectations of business customers from their IT service providers. The capabilities built by the IT industry over the previous three decades, while continuing to be necessary, were beginning to be considered grossly insufficient to cater to the expectations of the rapidly digitalizing market. Client firms increasingly demand more agile, innovative, modular, product-based application environments which would allow their businesses to scale up and widen their scope.

As academics mapping the evolution of the IT industry and its impact on information systems academia in India, we are bound to acknowledge an alternative viewpoint that contests the very idea that the Indian IT industry was not product-focused. This alternative stance, often presented by practitioners and industry experts, argues that the line between process innovation and product innovation in information technology, specifically software, is both thin and grey. In creating new ways of doing things in software provision and software services delivery, IT firms have to necessarily create software products. It is, and quite naturally, likely that the agreements between clients and IT service providers prevent IT firms from repackaging or marketing these products by themselves (Nambisan, 2001). Second, should an Indian IT firm attempt to segregate its revenue from products from that of its revenue from services, which is a difficult exercise given the inherent overlapping characteristics of the two, the performance pressure from investors is likely to rise significantly. Software products are often perceived by the market as information goods whose characteristics include very high costs but also low marginal costs and increasing returns to scale. Market expectations from software products, therefore, are quite different from those expected from software services, which are often seen as dominated by variable costs, scale-dependent and not easily differentiable (Nambisan, 2001).

In parallel with this challenge of services to products, two developments seem to present themselves as significant new opportunities for the industry. First, the growing domestic market has called for more localized research, design and development of end-user devices, applications and enterprise products and applications (Sethi and Gott, 2016). Second, a plethora of start-ups, fostered by an increasingly failure-tolerant, risk-taking set of technology patrons and venture capitalists, apart from a growing number of incubators and accelerators, are together contributing to an image overhaul, from a cost-driven low-skilled industry to one that showcases India’s true knowledge and innovation capabilities (Kumar et.al., 2017). The eroding boundaries between the different sectors of the economy seem to add to these opportunities in helping the industry respond to the uncertainties resulting from the services to products transition. Interestingly, with new technologies such as cloud computing, the very definition of software products also seems to be undergoing a rethink, giving rise to the phenomenon of servitization of information technology application products and solutions (Sultan, 2014). Yet, these are wait-and-watch, uncertain transformations, the course of which cannot be so easily determined, let alone consciously controlled, in the same way as the IT industry of the past.

In order for the industry to sustain these uncertainties, it seems to us that some complementarities need to be ensured, some of which are already beginning to sprout. First, the educational institutions that generate the human capital demanded by the industry have to transit to more innovation, design-centric and experimentative environments which foster idea-generation capabilities amongst the students. Second, the financial ecosystem which funds and supports the industry must become more tolerant towards deep-funnel adventures of the industry, albeit with...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1 Information systems in India: dare to cross
• Part 1 Technology in action: an Indian perspective
• Part 2 Adoption of technology: issues and challenges
• Part 3 Behavioural issues in the IT industry
• Part 4 Systems theory-based methodologies
• Part 5 The challenges of electronic globalization