The future of ‘civic’ technologies after COVID-19

In 1973, the British economist Ernst Schumacher wrote his manifesto “Small is Beautiful”, and changed the world. Schumacher’s prescription — to use technologies that were less resource-intensive, capable of generating employment, and “appropriate” to local circumstances — appealed to a Western audience that worried about feverish consumption by the ‘boomer’ generation. Silicon Valley soon seized the moment, presenting modern-day, personal computing as an alternative to the tyranny of IBM’s Big Machine. Meanwhile, in India too, the government asked citizens to embrace technologies suited to the country’s socio-economic life. Both had ulterior motives: the miniaturisation of computing was inevitable given revolutions in semiconductor technology during the sixties and seventies, and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley expertly harvested the anti-IBM mood to offer themselves as messiahs. The government in New Delhi too was struggling to mass-produce machines, and starved of funds, so asking Indians to “make do” with appropriate technology was as much a political message as it was a nod to environmentalism.

And thus, India turned its attention to mechanising bullock carts, producing fuel from bio-waste, trapping solar energy for micro-applications, and encouraging the use of hand pumps. These were, in many respects, India’s first “civic”, or socially relevant technologies.

The “appropriate technology” movement in India had two unfortunate consequences. The first has been a celebration of jugaad, or frugal innovation. Over decades, Indian universities, businesses and inventors have pursued low-cost technologies that are clearly not scaleable but valued culturally by peers and social networks. (Sample the press coverage every year of IIT students who build ‘sustainable’ but limited-use technologies, that generate fuel from plastic or trap solar energy for irrigation pumps.) Second, the “small is beautiful” philosophy also coloured our view of “civic technologies” as those that only mobilise the citizenry, out into farms or factory floors. Whether they took the form of a hand pump, solar stove or bullock cart, these technologies did little to augment the productivity of an individual. However, they preserved the larger status quo and did not disrupt social or industrial relations as technological revolutions have historically done. 

Nevertheless, there has always been a latent demand in India for technologies that don’t just mobilise individuals but also act as “playgrounds”, creating and connecting livelihoods. When management guru Peter Drucker visited post-Emergency India in 1979, Prime Minister Morarji Desai sold him hard on “appropriate technology”. India, Drucker wrote, had switched overnight from championing big steel plants to small bullock carts. Steel created no new jobs outside the factory, and small technologies did not improve livelihoods. Instead, he argued, India ought to look at the automotive industry as an “efficient multiplier” of livelihoods: beyond the manufacturing plant, automobiles would create new sectors altogether in road building and maintenance, traffic control, dealerships, service stations and repair. Drucker also pointed to the transistor as another such technology. Above all, transistors and automobiles connected Indians to one another through information and travel. Drucker noted during his visit that the motor scooter and radio transistor were in great demand in even far-flung corners, a claim that is borne by statistics. These, then were the civic technologies that mattered, ones that created playgrounds in which many could forge their livelihoods. 

The lionisation of jugaad is an attitudinal problem, and may not change immediately. But the task of creating a new generation of civic technologies that act as playgrounds can be addressed more readily.  In fact, it is precisely during crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that India acutely requires such platforms.


Consider the post-lockdown task of economic reconstruction in India, which requires targeted policy interventions. Currently, the Indian government is blinkered to address only two categories of actors who need economic assistance: large corporations with their bottom lines at risk, and at the micro-level, individuals whose stand to lose livelihoods. India’s banks will bail out Big Business, while government agencies will train their digital public goods — Aadhaar, UPI, eKYC etc — to offer financial assistance to individuals. This formulaic approach misses out the vast category of SMEs who employ millions, account for nearly 40% of India’s exports, pull in informal businesses into the supply chain and provide critical products to the big industries.

To be sure, the data to identify SMEs (Income Tax Returns/ GSTN/ PAN) exists, as do the digital infrastructure to effect payments and micro-loans. The funds would come not only from government coffers but also through philanthropic efforts that have gained steam in the wake of the pandemic. However, the “playground” needs to be created — a single digital platform that can provide loans, grants or subsidies to SMEs based on specific needs, whether for salaries, utilities or other loan payments. A front-end application would provide any government official information about schemes applied for, and funds disbursed to a given SME.

Civic technologies in India have long been understood to mean small-scale technologies. This is a legacy of history and politics, which policymakers have to reckon with. The civic value of technology does not lie in the extent to which it is localised, but its ability to reach the most vulnerable sections of a stratified society like India’s. The Indian government, no matter how expansive its administrative machinery is, cannot do this on its own. It has to create “playgrounds” — involving banks, cooperative societies, regulators, software developers, startups, data fiduciaries and underwriting modellers — if it intends to make digital technologies meaningful and socially relevant.  

Please Note: A version of this was first published on Business Standard on 17 April 2020

About the author: Arun Mohan Sukumar is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and a volunteer with the non-profit think-tank, iSPIRT. He is currently based in San Francisco. His book, Midnight’s Machines: A Political History of Technology in India, was published by Penguin Random House in 2019

Digitization of the Indian Legal System

India is fast embracing the concept of digitization as we have realised that digitization is the way forward. In a country like ours where people are plagued with paperwork, running from pillar to post getting work done just adds on to our woes. In order to expedite the course of justice delivery, digitization of the Indian legal system needs to be brought about.

There is a huge backlog of cases and ushering in a paperless digitized wave, will increase the efficiency of the legal system. The e-Courts mission of the Central Government aims at reducing pendency of court cases, digitizing court records, increasing efficiency, using human resources effectively, making judgments available online for the common man among other things.   

In the wake of the Digital India initiative, the Central Government has also introduced the concept of LIMBS, which is an online platform aiming at digitizing the court process. There has been a remarkable change in the way the legal system was perceived a decade ago and the transition from typewriters to digitized tools is remarkable and it is here to stay.

There are lot many anomalies in the current legal system and there is a serious need for things to be streamlined. Paperwork needs to give way to a more technological approach. Digitizing the legal system will eliminate the problem of storage of documents. Successful automation of court procedures will alleviate the burden on available human resources. Indian courts are inundated with cases and the pendency is on a all time high, a proper system in place is very imperative.

LegalDesk.com, in collaboration with iSPIRT Foundation, is organizing a conference on the Digitization of the Indian Legal System on the occasion of the Legal Services Day, on November 9th. The aim of the conference is to pave way for digitization in the legal space, which is very imperative at this juncture. One of the key topics of discussion would be India Stack and its applicability in the legal space.

The event will feature panel discussions by the likes of legal and technology bigwigs Shri Prabhuling K Navadgi, Additional Solicitor General of India, Shri Aditya Sondhi, Additional Advocate General, Karnataka, Shri Sajan Poovayya, Senior Advocate Supreme Court Of India, Shri Kishore Mandyam, Co founder DAKSH Society of India and Shri Sanjay Khan, Policy expert, iSPIRT Foundation among others, wherein they will talk about the impediments in the present legal system and ways to overcome those by incorporating technology in the system.

Shri. Kishore Mandyam, will deliver a talk on Technology Reforms for the Indian Judiciary, followed by a Paper Presentation and a presentation on Legal Digitization by LegalDesk.com and panel discussions by the above mentioned experts.

During the event, LegalDesk.com is going to release a white paper on the concept of eNotary in our traditional legal system to benefit the lives of common people.

Students, law professionals, advocates, academicians and many others will be attending the event to contribute and learn from this discussion. The conference will be open to anyone who wishes to be a part of this initiative.

Venue: KSCA Auditorium, No. 1, M Chinnaswamy Stadium, Cubbon Road, Bengaluru

More details about this Connference can be accessed at http://legaldesk.com/event

NEED FOR CUSTOMER CENTRICITY

Today’s competitive market is reducing margins and driving enterprises from customer acquisition to customer retention approach. The need of the hour is customer centricity, to create products around customer needs.

Telecom service providers, unlike online industries like Amazon, Apple, Google and eBay, store customer data in silos due to the inherent complexities in the service portfolio. This in turn impedes 360 degree view of the customer and adversely impacts customer loyalty.

“There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing …”

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, at Techonomy Conference 2010

The first step towards customer centricity is to break these silos and transform them to a unified platform that gives a 360 degree view of customer data and then pool all customer data into a central warehouse that maps different lines of businesses to a customer.

“The teams merged but the systems didn’t, so from the outside it looks like a merged company, but from the inside we see a mobile customer, a TV customer, an Internet customer, but sometimes they can all be the same person.”

Martin Péronnet, Monaco Telecom CEO, from www.totaltele.com

The second step is to use this unified platform to deliver customer knowledge that will be used by marketing to send relevant offers for up-sell and cross-sell. Further, you will have to move into interactive operations by identifying customers (based on daily usage)who are prone to move to another operator. These customers are given personalized and relevant offers to retain them. The final step is to align all departments in using the consolidated customer data in their day to day operations to provide a superior customer experience.

Customer centricity is not about replacing your existing systems, but it is simply a realignment of your processes for business agility and operational efficiency.

Reference
What customers really want. (n.d.). Retrieved January 27, 2015, from www.rolandberger.com

Need the right data to make the right decision

Recently I read a blog post by Mr. Przyklenk, senior manager, digital insights, for TDBank Group. Big Data is the next “BIG” thing, but is this “BIG” thing applicable for everyone, is the “BIG question.

Let’s consider TDBank Group, the second largest financial institution in Canada.  They began re-evaluating their customer data when branch traffic declined without a significant increase in digital transactions. There are five major challenges referred as 5 S’s, the bank was facing while data analysis.

  • Siloed: multiple systems for different lines of business to connect to customers
  • Structured: several layers of data ownership, governance and access levels, requires vast institutional knowledge
  • Super-expensive: internal cost structures including chargeback models for processing time and bandwidth
  • Strange: systems are older than the analysts using them and the information generated is difficult to understand
  • Speed: financial institution mainframes offer faster processing speed but without structured data analysis cannot be effective.

A huge amount of unstructured data from multiple sources is dirty and data analytics cannot make sense of it.  Prospects and customers expect personalized and relevant offers based on behavioral and relationship data, which cannot be achieved with the above challenges.

Among customer data collection and analysis, enterprise should invest in centralized data warehouse, data management platform and customer journey mapping.

Centralized data warehouse will consolidate all the customer data which in turn will help marketers spend more time on launching campaigns rather than consolidating data.  This consolidated warehouse can also be integrated with other applications like CRM to make customer data available to all stakeholders. A data management platform and customer journey mapping will provide a single customer relationship across different lines of business with a personalized communication. Finally these changes in an organization will provide a 360 degree view of your customer.

Big data is needed to better understand the customer, but you need the right resources and equipment to fully understand it to generate results.

Reference

Britt, P. (2014, December 17). Forget Big Data; Focus on Relevant Data. Retrieved December 30, 2014.

Need for automated revenue assurance in telecoms

The practice of revenue assurance has evolved from simply identifying leaks to being the process through which continual improvement could be driven.

  • TM forum (Revenue assurance – quick insights)

*A single person uses 3-4 different types of telecommunication services in a day. Let’s consider India that has a population of around 1.2 billion with 2 plans being offered by a telecom service provider (TSP) and 2 telecom services are being used by each person. 4billion+ bills are generated considering each service and each plan differently. Imagine the bills generated by TSP’s around the globe.

The revenue assurance team comes into picture due to the possibility of overbilling and under billing. Revenue assurance team audits few bill from each batch to maintain bill accuracy. But the team cannot audit all the bills generated. Apart from the fact that the manual audit is a costly affair, the possibility of erroneous billing still exists.

TSP cannot create a positive experience with an overbilled monthly statement. And if the same situation repeats, the customer would go ahead and avail the service of another TSP. Now, if a telecom subscriber was under billed for the services availed, the TSP is losing its revenue.

So, the big question for the TSP’s is how to ensure it doesn’t under bill or over bill its subscribers. Transform your manual revenue assurance into an automated process.

The automated billing assurance system:

  1. Eliminates human errors in misinterpretation of plans and services activated for each subscriber. Thus, ensuring accurate billing for the different services availed by a subscriber.
  2. Automates the audit of bills by referring the services availed by the subscriber, and validates the same with the billing system. Thereby eliminating any computational errors in the bill presentment.

Accordingly, by ensuring error free bill presentment, the TSP is in compliance to the regulations of metering and billing, and the assurance of accurateness is also established. This would certainly be a game changer for Telco’s in the field of revenue assurance and would aid the TSP in battling the subscriber churn rate due to erroneous billing. The automation of revenue assurance would be a cost effective way of putting a lid to the revenue leakage for the TSP’s.

*Values were considered to show importance of revenue assurance. No real time values were used.

Acknowledgement – special thanks to Praveen Y (Analyst at Intense Technologies) for providing information on this domain

Enterprise Agility in Public Sector Insurance

Indian insurance market today is primarily dependent on push, tax incentives and mandatory buying for sales. There is very little customer pull, which will come from with increasing savings and disposable income. With the recent increase of FDI limit to 49% from 26% has put more pressure on public insurance companies to maintain their market share.

Public Insurance Systems
Premiums from Life Insurance is decreasing since 2011 and there is no significant growth in Non-Life Insurance premium from 2012 (growing population, vehicles should increase premiums collected every year). India’s population is 1,22,88,88,667* and only 20% are insured i.e. 98,31,10,933 people are uninsured. Working population is 49,15,55,467** that can afford insurance. With these numbers, India’s insurance adoption rate and the premiums collections are decreasing every year.
*Accurate data was not available, forecasting was done
*Data based on censusindia.gov, 2001

Insurance1

Source – Data from IRDA

Digital Solution
Current projections show that, by 2030, the global middle class could constitute 50% of the world’s population. Today’s low income consumers become tomorrow’s middle class. Insurance companies need to effectively target emerging customers through awareness (marketing), affordability (products) and accessibility (ease of purchasing, servicing and claims handling). A digital solution will build enterprise agility helping public insurance move away from pull strategy and engage people with a push strategy.

Marketing
IRDA is trying to make people aware of the benefits of insurance. They are successful in getting 20% of the total population insured, but the other 80% of the population is not aware or they are not considering insurance important.
Alerts Management – Insurance companies should remind people constantly through SMS, e-mail and IVR, the important of insurance and the benefits they will reap from it.
Campaign management – Definitely public insurance companies are publicizing their schemes and products through media channels but a measurement of every campaign is needed. A digitalized campaign management solution would give public insurance company’s information on which campaign was effective and how many products they sold through that.

Products
Insurance products should be created based on the needs of the customer to attract more customers.
Analytics- Have an analytics solution in place to constantly monitor your customer’s behavior through available external databases to give them products they need the most.

Interactive e-mail- Have a push mechanism email strategy solution, where the solution should mail all relevant products to existing/prospect customers to give them more available options. Customer should be able to view all available products within their mailbox instead of getting redirected to the company web portal.

Purchasing, servicing and claims handling
Make your customer onboarding and other transaction simple to pass on their experience to their friends and family.
Self-care portal – An integrated self-care portal that can be used to browse through products, online purchase, submit claims and take feedback or requests. Centralized application that should integrate with existing processes to create a uniform platform.
Onboard- use digital onbording solution for faster onboarding clients. Research shows that many people change their mind half way through onboarding process. Do not lose a customer with snail onboarding.
Interactive e-mail – Integrate the web portal into a PDF and give greater control to the customer.

Insurance2

YOY Life Insurance Premium with and without Digital Solution

*Note
• The above calculations are based on historical data
• These approximate statistics are used to show the benefit of a digital solution

Insurance3

YOY Non Life Insurance Premium with and without Digital Solution

*Note
• The above calculations are based on historical data
• These approximate statistics are used to show the benefit of a digital solution

Benefits with Enterprise Agility

  • Increase insurance penetration in India (SMS alerts in rural areas).
  • Increase in premium with alerts about insurance to everyone.
  • Faster time to market new insurance products.
  • Relevant offers are sent to customers for generating revenue.
  • Centralized application can be accessed by clients and business users.
  • Enhance customer experience and reduce client acquisition.
  • Provide specific, focused and timely marketable messages
  • Revenue realization by upto 35-40% per customer segment
  • Ability to analyze transaction information and make payment though the interactive PDF provides useful insights and greater convenience to the customers
  • Targeted and personalized promotional offers and interactive hyperlinks that lead to more information about the offers enables customer to be better informed