Technology Traps

The vows of the Indian CAT are far from over. Orkut exposure, further technical glitches etc continue to haunt the IIM mangement. One cannot help remember that we in India still face the first, second and third wave[remember Alvin Toffler’s categories] simultaneously. When the end user may be in the third wave,the source may be in the second wave and the intermediary may still be in the first wave as far as technology readiness is concerned. Let me give my experience of today to illustrate this point. I visited my bank to make a fixed deposit in a joint account with my daughter. What should have taken 5 to 10 minutes normally took more than an hour as the network was very slow .The reason given was it is the first week of the month and usage density is high. Ok. I went there after to draw cash from an ATM belonging to the largest public sector bank in the country. The board outside said “Out of Order”. On the 1st of Dec,another ATM of this bank did not have any cash. It is an irony that this bank has widely advertised asking customers with ATM card NOT to visit any branch for cash withdrawal and instead take cash out from ATM upto Rs 40,000 in a day in 3 transactions. Where is the weak link? cash management, technical failure or logistics break down?. Some one needs to answer for this. My third experience relates to my visit to our Army canteen to buy my monthly needs.The Smart Card issued to me with All India applicability failed to work as there was a bad connection.Besides,the credit card reader was not functioning. In all the three cases,there is no other human interface for a normal redundancy and alternative mode of transaction. So,the customer suffers.This is a routine scenario in the cities everywere in India. Rapid growth in usage volumes has not yet been matched with technology upgrades for the systems backups resulting in such glitches often. It is high time,the CIO’s of such organisations gear up and deliver.