DailyPost 949
INTEGRATION
System integrators came on the horizon with integration becoming the key element in IT Projects, they were super vendors, with a different digital skin, who had the expertise, generally unproven, to stitch products, processes, services, network, communication services etc into one, and give the final product – robust and fully functional. It could be a CCTV network with video surveillance or ERP created and deployed with all other peripherals or an integrated command and control room. It can be an software update, with data migration and merger, with privacy and security in built. And with emerging technologies and cloud becoming the mainstay, the problems would go manifold.
The system integrator either brings the critical elements from his own kitty or through a host of vendors which is known as a consortium in professional parlance but in reality a cartel. The main task of the project say software development has to be necessarily done by the Main Vendor. Sometimes even the main task is surreptitiously handed to a different vendor, sister concern or otherwise. The main vendor is rechristened as the System Integrator, the biggest of the companies not understanding the different between the two at the operational level.
There would be no project in the country where all cogs in the wheel of Project execution would have worked in tandem and delivered on time, quality and features. The company can claim to be the System Integrator, but what has the main resource to offer. He is euphemistically called the Project Manger, generally from software or management background, whose philosophy is that if the parts meet, the whole emerges. They have never been taught integration and nobody has tested their integration skills. The pre-sales guys have made a System Integrator out of Vendor and a Project Manager out of an IT employee.
Projects heavily dependent on integration would keep on failing or delivered stunted till the System Integrators learn it themselves and then teach it to their Project Managers. Learning new age multidisciplinary skills would have its own challenges. Might be its time Digital Integration at MTech level can be initiated as a new specialisation.
DIGITAL SUTRADHAR IS THE JOB OF THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE.
Sanjay Sahay