History of India in Maps

The changing map of India from 1 AD to the 20th century. Truly, the mind-blowing history of India.

Please Refer to the Link Given Above. 


Rich History of India has been wonderfully expressed through Maps. This is really a great collection. 

The Great Indian Territory stood the Test of Time to evolve as a rich, diverse, accommodating and vibrant culture. Learning through twist and turns of historical events, this region has developed values, which remain hallmark of a civilized society. I can proudly say we have mastered the art of living peacefully with extreme diversities (of different dimensions - most important among them are co-existence of different school of thoughts in harmony). India should not be confined in 'narrow domestic walls' like region, caste or religion. Probably such a confinement will be gross injustice to concept of India. And, more importantly, propagating such a confining thought process may eventually erode the invaluable learning this civilization has imbibed through historical events over many many centuries.

JAI - HIND and HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY...............:-) :-) :-)

Reference:- 

http://www.speakingtree.in/spiritual-slideshow/seekers/philosophy/map-of-india-from-1-ad-to-the-20th-century/273798

How Sensitization Program helps in Organizational Change Management for major ICT Initiatives?

ICT (Information and Communications Technology) driven technology initiatives bring changes to an organization that are accelerating and transformative. As a result, major ICT initiatives undertaken by organizational leadership are usually supplemented by Capacity Building and Change Management exercise (CB & CM). The objectives of such an exercise are (a) enhancing skills of the employees (so that they may be able to work with newly installed ICT systems) and (b) making the organization adapt to the changes (different type of changes like changes in organizational processes, in organizational response time or in organizational communications).

Many of the ICT initiatives fail to meet the intended objectives due to failure of CB & CM exercise to ensure adaption of new way of doing things. It is observed that this happens more often with the implementations of e-Governance initiatives. Now, the question is how to make CB & CM much more effective? How to maximize the likelihood for success of CB & CM schemes? These are a couple of questions, which are found difficult to be addressed by organizational leaders and ICT project planners. It is true that there are no straight forward answer to these questions. Most of the time situational factors, context of initiatives, organizational dynamics and interests of stakeholders need to be taken into consideration for design of a suitable CB & CM scheme.   

In my opinion, organizational transformation may become easier, if the organization itself could be made to own the transformation. I have learned through my experience (in different roles technical, managerial and consulting in ICT sector) that no external agency (Consulting Agency / Training Institutes / ICT System Integrators / other such agencies) could do justice to CB & CM, unless an organization itself starts believing in the benefits of the change (brought about through the implementation of the project) and starts to prepare itself to embrace change. To prepare organizations to own the change, a sensitization program conducted before the start of the project is usually found to be helpful.

Initiating a systematic sensitization program right since design of the project could lead to early engagement of stakeholders with the dynamics of change, the project eventually proposes to introduce in due course of time. Early involvement of stakeholders leads to proper addressing of their valid apprehensions by the organizational leadership and/or by the change agents within and outside the organizations. Gradually, throughout the implementation of the project, as the changes become clearer through progressive elaboration, the stakeholders get curious to know more about the true nature of changes, they prepare their minds for upcoming changes and they try to adapt to these changes. The CB & CM schemes are most effective, when they are tuned to support the stakeholders at the time they have begun to themselves adapt to changes. These schemes are the best accelerators to changing organizations rather than inducers of change to the organizations.

Changes are inevitable, but a sensible way to transit through changes with consensus of stakeholders is a hallmark of credible organizations. Top executives must advocate for organizational benefits of slow, sustainable and participative change management with the governing body (Governing Board / Council) of the organization.      

However, the bigger question is how to design sensitization program? The answer is not simple, but I will try to highlight some points as per my understanding on the matter. In my opinion, usually organizations are made to follow path of transformation by either (a) a push from higher management (leadership), or (b) a pull from customers (citizens / beneficiaries for government organizations). And, usually the change is resisted either (c) by employees (internal resistance) or (d) by external agencies / groups / organizations having stake in the organization. Designers of sensitization program must try to understand the four factors mentioned above to minute detail. They should try to come up with possible causes of internal and external resistance. A comprehensive work to chart down the hidden insecurities and apprehensions of these groups and to find a suitable way to address the issues must be carried out with honesty and sincerity. At the same time, the designers of sensitization program must also contemplate all the possible benefits for organizational leadership and for beneficiaries (customers or general public), which are expected to come through the implementation of the project. The group of people designing the sensitization program must also plan for the best possible ways for conveying the intended message to respective stakeholders in clear and concise but interactive and participative way. Lastly, the sensitization program must have a metric based monitoring and control mechanism. The metric system should also include indicators to measure the effect of sensitization. With all the above mentioned consideration a comprehensive sensitization program should be planned and scheduled before start of the project.

A proper sensitization not only helps in making the project to meet its objectives, it also helps in maximizing the outcome of the project in the interest of organization and in making an organization itself take a lead in the process of transformation.

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How to assess ICT Capacity Requirements to Support Institutional Change?

Organizations world over consistently undergo institutional change for organizational strengthening. In recent times, ICT (Information Communication Technology) has become an integral part of organizations. Therefore, for planned institutional change (or complete institutional restructuring), the Change Managers need to perform an assessment of required change to existing ICT Capacity within any organization.    

Many Change Managers ask me to suggest a methodology to do assessment of ICT Capacity required for an Institutional Change. Now, organizations vary significantly from each other on strategic use of ICT and therefore, it is difficult to suggest a generic methodology. However, I believe, the following way I usually suggest to Change Managers (to an extent) works for them to do a brief initial analysis and to organize their thoughts towards conceptualizing an ICT change management synchronized with other aspects of organizational change.    

A broad assessment of IT Capacity for Institutional Change can be initiated on the basis of following four aspects of ICT implementation within organizations:-

1.       Institutional Support Capacity

2.       Electronic Service Delivery Capacity

3.       Organizational Automation

4.       Technology Infrastructure Capacity

 The broad outline for implementing above points are represented through following tables:-

Table -1: Matrix for assessing Institutional Support Capacity (customized using UNDP 1997 norms - see references section below for more details)

Level – 1 Dimensions of Environmental Capacity (IT)	Existing Capacity	Required Capacity	Estimated Capacity Gap	Possible Strategies
IT Policy framework
Legal and regulatory framework
Management accountability
Level – 2 Dimensions of Organization	Existing Capacity	Required Capacity	Estimated Capacity Gap	Possible Strategies
IT Strategic management
IT Organizational Structure
IT Processes
Human resources (IT)
Financial Resources (IT)
Level – 3 Dimensions of Individual Capacity (IT Human Resources)	Existing Capacity	Required Capacity	Estimated Capacity Gap	Possible Strategies
Job Skills and Needs
Professional Development
Access to Information
Performance/Incentives
Communication Skills

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Table -2: Matrix for assessing Electronic Delivery of Services Capacity

Electronic Delivery of Services	Existing Capacity	Required Capacity	Estimated Capacity Gap	Possible Strategies
Number of Services
Volume of Transactions
Application Performance -          Service Level Norms -          Availability -          Scalability -          Inter-operability -          Latent Capacity (Ability to Handle Peak Load)
Security -          User Level -          Network Level -           Infrastructure Level -          Application & Database Level
Ease of Use

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Table -3: Matrix for Organizational Automation

Organizational Automation	Existing Capacity	Required Capacity	Estimated Capacity Gap	Possible Strategies
Project Tracking and Control
Finance Management
Human Resource Management
Procurement and Supply Chain Management
Other Auxiliary Operations (like social media, infrastructure management)
Data Analytic / Reporting

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Table -4: Matrix for Technology Infrastructure Capacity

IT Infrastructure	Existing Capacity	Required Capacity	Estimated Capacity Gap	Possible Strategies
Application Architecture and Design Application Upgradation Requirements
Application Support Systems (Auxiliary Supporting Software)
Networking
Hardware

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References:

Capacity needs assessment methodology and processes By Melvyn KAY, Consultant to IPTRID/FAO, Tom Franks, Senior Lecturer, Bradford Center for International Development and Sonia Tato, Technical Officer, IPTRID/FAO 

Link - ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/008/y5899e/y5899e01.pdf

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5 Reasons for Internal Resistance within Organizations for ICT Automation

Technological revolutions transform organizations. In recent times, it has been the ICT (Information Communications Technology) enablement that has lead the transformations within organizations.

Strategists suggest that ICT enablement is an ongoing process and it is about a series of consistent organizational transformations to leverage technology (for increasing productivity of organizations). Therefore, many experts insist on building inherent capability within organizations to keep on seamlessly adopting the changing ICT technologies.

But, adoption of ICT by any organization is not that easy. ICT Project Managers will tell you that for almost all the major ICT enablement projects, in between the push from management and pull from customers in favor of the project, there is a persistent internal resistance within the organization (undergoing transformation) throughout the life cycle of the project.

Moreover, it is observed that ICT projects are perceived to be more of a technology affair ever since its inception till its completion. And, in the process of ICT enablement, Change Management is not given the due importance. Change Management is at the best considered to be an internal capacity building exercise comprising of training (or at times hand-holding support) the existing employees to work with the newly installed systems.

In planning of the ICT lead transformation of organizations, what is grossly overlooked is the fact that organizations are run by people. If apprehensions in the minds of people (running the organization) are NOT adequately addressed, it results in internal resistance towards changes brought about by organizational transformation (through ICT enablement). Therefore, it is important to understand, what makes people resistive to change. My personal take on why people have a general tendency to resist ICT enablement at workplace are listed as under:-

1.      ICT Introduces Measurement – To indicate towards the fact that a lot of productive time gets wasted in the name of trivial things, it is so said that ‘In office meetings, hours are spent and minutes are recorded’.  Actually this is generally true for many aspects of office culture and meetings are no exception. Putting systems to monitor different aspects of official work puts a way to measure many of such tasks, which may be picked to supplement performance of employees. Prior to installation of ICT systems, people are used to be working in an environment, where only the supervisor assesses their assigned work for measurement of performance. Therefore, employees generally feel that computerization is taking them from a relatively free environment to little restrictive environment.

Moreover, measurements can become input to metric system used to derive different indicators about the health of any department (or section / sub-section) and may be compared with respect to other departments or against standard data for similar departments in other organizations.      

2.      ICT Limits Discretionary Power – Many employees are accustomed to using their personal discretion in matters related to (say) service provisioning or decision making on the behalf of organization (and these employees may be quite judicious while using their discretionary powers). ICT automation reduces instances when discretion of any office bearer would be required. And for the cases discretion is required, rational use of discretion may need to be established in the light of data captured by various systems. .

    

3.      ICT introduces Non-repudiation – Evidence stored in various server logs and various databases of the organizations (with authentication/authorization and with time stamp) makes non-repudiation assured to greater extent than physical files or physical registers managed by humans.

4.      ICT Curtails Positional Advantage – Usually people enjoy many advantages by holding a position within an organization. Such advantages stretch from social recognition to advantage of access to first-hand information. It is widely believed that computerization reduces asymmetry of information within an organization and at the same time reduces number of persons who approach to office bearers for services.   

5.      ICT Increases Role of Experts in Decision Making – ICT can be exploited to the best if it can be used to process information to create knowledge. To have the capability to process information captured within an organization and correlate with the external information (domain specific nitty-gritty, industry specific trends and information on market conditions on supporting facilities like (say) finance, human resources) requires contributions from external expertise. Howsoever polite, such expert interventions in the sphere of line management may seem, it may not always go well with the traditional way of decision making in traditional set-up.   

In the end, I feel that one word that can sum-up the above five points could be CONTROL. With the introduction of ICT enablement it is the control that employees feel they may be losing to machines. And, if the organizational change managers may take this into account, while designing change management plan, may be ICT projects may go much smoothly.   

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