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In th 1980s, BSNth fist t f its tinssts ddd stnth s tunss. Hs hn subsib sinthi bls.
Vol/2 | ISSUE/10
Signof The TimeB y Ku n al n . T al g er iAs a cricket-crazed teenager inDwarahak, a town in the Almora district of Uttar Pradesh,
Rajkumar Upadhyay never had it easy as an autograph
hunter. The big names were hard to come by even in
uptown Kanpur, where he once made it
into a squad of 30 youngsters in a cricket
academy. That was in 1977. On a different
wicket, almost 30 years later, his luck with
signatures changed as his IT team combed
through more than 10 lakh subscriber
signatures in BSNLs Bangalore Telecom
Districts Oracle 7 systems.
The teams immediate objective was to
The tedious effort would enable a faste
IT-powered mechanism for officials
service centers (CSC). It would allow th
a customers details
It took us not less
says Upadhyay, dep
IT at Bangalore Tele
my time was spent i
from past files, whi
because of old hardw
store as many signa
REAL CIO WOR
Reader ROI:
Howtodevelopanintegratedsolutionwithlegacysystems
Thecaseforin-houseIT
development
Analternativetoachieving
userbuy-in
Project Management
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10. The newer versions store signatures as a part of a record.
However, Oracle 7 would store a signature as an individual
file. This made fetching signatures difficult, he recalls.
It was the most mind-numbing aspect of Project Falcon,
designed to deliver BSNL services through a single window.
But the signature-campaign of sorts has made all the
difference. For customers in Bangalore, the application has
reduced a month-long verification process to get a new line to
less than a day. For CSC officials, the signature-driven feature
of the Web-based application entails access to 12 area servers
that store customer information, thus empowering them to
authorize customer requests at a faster clip. The clerk has
suddenly become empowered in a sense. He only has to
check for the signature on the database. It will come with all
corresponding details, notes Upadhyay.
The single window application itself came into operation in
August 2006. Its too early to draw conclusions of its efficacy
from an ROI perspective. But Project Falcon has already
received a national e-governance award for Exemplary
usage of ICT by PSUs in February this year. And going by
other indicators, it appears to be a technology solution that
has combined financial innovation with the intent of being
user-friendly to CSC officials and the public. The trick lay
in planning and marrying an efficient front-end with a
robust backend mechanism.
Tcly Bs at hIn several respects, the management of BSNL had taken the
technology plunge much before its counterparts in other
sectors of the economy. In the 1980s, for example, it had
computerized several aspects of its operations pertaining
to a range of services like billing. The question at the turn
of the century, for Bangalore Telecom District, was whether
its great strength was turning into a greater weakness. For,
technology expansion was happening in phases through
a process of adding systems without a central network to
house their multiple systems.
Further, though a customer could avail of technology
benefits during registration of services, the time and effort
it called for was still immense. The New Lines (NL) server
was catering to Bangalore City as a whole, and the customer
from any part of Bangalore had to come to the centralized NL
counter working from a specific location, says
Upadhyay. The systems were working as silos
in their respective area, he adds.
By 2006, BSNL was rendering a range of
services beyond just new lines: broadband,
mobile telephony and its peripheral services,
apart from billing and complaint redressal
functions. Such a market required an integrated,
multi-faceted and faster system to cater to these
services a WAN, to begin with.Without a wide area network, it was difficult
to consolidate all the servers, leading to lack of an
integrated database for a single front-end, says
Upadhyay. This forced the customer to deal with
separate departments. The lack of an integrated
database also delayed information from getting
to management, thereby causing reduced control
on efficiency of customer services, he explains.
Significantly, Upadhyay felt the best step
forward was to develop the application in-house
for two reasons: no one could understand the
needs and limitations of the front-end better
than its own IT team. Secondly, it was best
placed to tap the benefits of BSNLs large existing
infrastructure and resources.
Our entire IT cell is not more 20-30 people,
says Upadhyay. We appointed a networking
team for the WAN work who would deal with
the switches, fiber connections, etcetera. This
had one sub-divisional engineer and one junior
telecom officer, apart from the maintenance guys.
From the software side, we had four to five people.
Our software employs ASP and JSP, primarily
Project Management
because we had in-house expertise in those two
platforms, he adds.
To begin with, the Bangalore Telecom IT
team connected all its area servers in January
last year, using optic fiber onto one network,
yet allowing them to function independently.
This would form the core architecture. Then,
they brought the commercial office, call center
operations, network management system
and central directory enquiry onto the same
platform to enable an integrated view from a
single location. And all dumb terminals working
in the system were replaced by PCs. Except for
the WAN infrastructure, we havent spent on
anything else, says Upadhyay. Building the
WAN network cost about Rs 1 crore. Otherwise,
we have used existing resources like optic fiber,
and freeware like Apache Tomcat for the Web
Server, he adds. The WAN can be used for
other applications and is scaleable, he says.
Typically, for projects like this, a large portion
of the expenditure is spent on consultancy.
By developing and maintaining it in-house,
Bangalore Telecom bypassed that spend.
L Up SlutsThe Karnataka circle has an IT budget allotment
of nearly Rs 15 crore per annum, a third of
which is utilized by Bangalore Telecom. However, if you can
demonstrate benefits, budget is not an issue in government,
Upadhyay asserts. Unsurprisingly, the success of the singlewindow application is expected to pave way for a model
that will be developed and managed by a vendor. This will
consolidate the 12 servers in Bangalore. We will begin that
shortly, and are inviting tenders from April, he says.
Another component of the project that is on the anvil is
disaster recovery. We are doing a DR server. That is o ne thing
we need to build in. says Upadhyay who is also Bangalore
Telecom Districts deputy general manager for infrastructure
planning & business development. The current lack of DR is
among the projects few weakness.
And as far as ROI is concerned, apart from the visible
benefits at the front end, Bangalore Telecom has begun to
generate a higher quantum of revenue through its services.
In terms of money, because of reduced timelines, we record
additional rental and revenue because we can provide a
service to customers earlier than before. With that calculation,
we can document how we have already recovered co sts. There
are process efficiencies, Upadhyay points out.
The biggest benefit though is intangible: back-end
capability. With online management reports on the
performance of critical parameters, which impact delivery of
services to the customers, the application has created greater
transparency in the system.
The result is that Bangalore Telecom is
to report, classify and compare perfo
of area managers. It has given man
a handle to hold division heads acco
about areas to focus on, to laud ef
and point to pending jobs. The b
infrastructure has effectively overc
practice of depending on divisional he
their subordinates for status reports o
and projects.
In addition to the CSCs, the IT orga
also devised two routes for customers
service and information: an SMS serve
Bangalore Telecom website. Customer
information and avail services, like co
booking, complaint status, bill
outstanding bills and changed number
by sending a message to the SMS ser
information is also available on the
apart from a function to pay bills on
online payments, the amount passe
BSNL to the gateway is Rs. 3 per trans
case of transaction through bank or 1
subject to maximum of Rs 1,000 if a p
is made via credit card.
While alternative routes are
currency in Bangalore, the onus is sti
on the customer service centers. These c
to be the face of BSNLs quality of service, and
personnel at the CSCs was a challenge. They were
to use computers at the start, fearing that one wronga key and they might lose data or, worse, the syste
get damaged, smiles Upadhyay.
The solution was to keep it simple. At every leve
we discussed a new technology, I told the persons co
what part of it would be relevant to our target. If I sh
whole project, they might have found it mind-bogg
telling each one of them their parts helped me keep
and generate the desired result, he explains.
This approach proved especially useful i n the deve
stage, says Upadhyay, because an IT head in gov
takes upon himself the task of integrating versati
limited, technology skill-sets. A person might be in
Tomorrow, he might be elsewhereWhen we comple
on the single window product, the IT personnel the
were surprised with the results, he says.
Upadhyay believes Project Falcon is capable
implemented across Karnataka and in other geograp
He only hopes amassing the signatures then doesnt
to be as much of a challenge as it was in Bangalore. C
Proje
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Vol/2 | ISSUE/105 6 a p r i l 1 , 2 0 0 7 | REAL CIO WORLD REAL CIO WORVol/2 | ISSUE/10
SNAPSHOT
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THe SySTemSwere workINgaS SILoS IN THeIrreSpecTIve area.This forcedcusTomers To dealwiTh separaTedeparTmenTs.Rajkmar upadhyayDeputyGM-IT,BangaloreTelecomDistrict