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Join the team building cool tech stuff for 1.3 billion Indian citizens… from the startup trenches inside the Government!

After SlideShare, I’ve taken up a role in the government sector. I recently joined the National eGovernance Division, Ministry of IT, Govt of India. My work involves architecting and building e-governance facing products and services under the Digital India program. So after doing a startup, getting acquired, shuttling between Delhi & Silicon Valley… now e-Governance?? What does this term even mean… and why should you care?

You should care because there’s a good chance that (like me) you are a first generation beneficiary of the internet and have seen the transformative role it has played in your life. The way you work, learn, read, buy, communicate, travel, make friends – everything has been turned upside down. Now imagine if the internet could have that same impact on how India is governed. Imagine if the simplicity and fluidity of platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype could be replicated in the citizen services that you and I use everyday – be it applying for a passport or a driving license, filing your taxes or getting your govt scholarship. Imagine what citizen services can be built on top of the biometric identification system Aadhaar, which currently at 830 million is just a stone’s throw from the billion mark. Imagine if the internet could be the same change agent in the lives of our less connected co-citizens in far off towns & villages, in the tribal areas, in remote rural corners where roads dont reach – thats what e-governance is about.

The National eGovernance Division (NeGD) under the Ministry of IT is tasked with designing and running national e-governance programs. These take the form of 31 Mission Mode Projects (called MMPs) which are the administrative backbone of the Indian government. My team at DeitY/NeGD is looking for smart, motivated professionals to build e-governance products/services. For people from the private sector, this is a great opportunity for the following reasons-

– In a direct way, what you do in office everyday will contribute to the transformation of India into a digitally empowered society & knowledge economy
– There is a shift towards technology enabled open governance systems (open source, open APIs, open standards, open data) and you could drive this openness inside the government
– The Govt needs domain specialists… your domain expertise could shape key parts of government functioning
– Work like a fast paced startup while inside the government… these product teams will get a startup type environment to deliver quickly
– If you’ve only worked in the private sector previously (like me), this could be a refreshing change from its the profit driven culture

So what positions are available and whats the reqd background/experience?

These are the positions – Web Developer, UX/Interaction designer, Backend Engineer, Big Data Engineer, Android Developer, DevOps/Sysadmin, Open Source Community Manager. The projects are all high impact, massively scaled citizen facing technology applications e.g. Building services on top of Aadhaar’s core identity capability, products aimed at paperless governance, open governance initiatives (Open APIs, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Data) etc.

The roles are full time contractual positions (1-2 yrs) based in New Delhi at the Dept of IT in Scope Complex, Lodhi Road. Its a very centrally located office area.

In case you are interested, go to this link and apply using the given form. Brief job descriptions are given.

Or if you know of someone else who might be interested, please pass on the link.

If you have any questions about the roles, about DeitY/NeGD or how can you make the transition from your current course to working for the government (and what all that transition entails), feel free to drop me a mail – amitranjan25 AT gmail DOT com. Happy to help you think through this.

Reblogged from WebYantra

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Is Software Innovation an Art or a Science? It’s Artful Science or Scientific Art!

When we think of Software Product Innovation, we imagine getting “Eureka!” moments 3 am in the morning, getting up and writing down inspired thoughts and coding them the next morning!

Reality is much more mundane and is more of evolution rather than sudden insprirations from the sky!

Yahoo started because Jerry Yang and Filo just wanted to create a searchable directory of information first at Stanford University and then San Francisco in general!

facebook started as a teenage testorone-fueled comparion site for Harvard students to post pictures of fellow girl students and rate who’s hot and who’s not! From there it evolved into directories of students in universities to find each other for dating more than anythingelse. For a long time, facebook signed up university by university and not the general public-oriented thing it is now!

This stands for enterprise software products also – Oracle Relational Databases were less expensive, clumsy knock-offs and replacements for Digital Equipment Corporation’s RDB/VMS relational database system.

Before Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheets, there were Lotus Ami Pro and Lotus 123!

Before Google search, there were DEC Alta Vista search engine and Yahoo!

What made all the successful ones innovations in their own right were not just technical superiority but they took useful innovations and products before them and fixed annoying problems with their usages or expanded the concept of who can use them additionally or fixed usability problems with them.

Or they took an older concept and applied it to a new platform!

Or took an older concept and applied it to a newer market!

So if you want to innovate, you don’t necessarily to invent something new. You can innovate by doing one of these:

—- Is there something useful but not so easy to use? Can I fix it by making it easier to use? (Google’s single search box in the middle is a great example – Alta Vista got lost in boolean searches and requiring ANDs and ORs when specifying search. Google said – don’t worry about all of that stuff. We will take care of it. Just type in what you want into that box!)

— Can I take something useful and apply it to a new market? eBay India was another company before it became eBay bought it and made it eBay India. Flipkart is India’s Amazon. Cleartrip is India’s Expedia! Make no mistake. They are not just copies. Flipkart uses courier delivery. Cleartrip is useful for buying train tickets less painfully than when going to the IRCTC website. They all add some value and difference!

— Can I take something in one platform and make it suitable and applicable to another platform? Mobiile versions of applications may need to be differently designed and executed than an online, browser version of something.

— Can I build a family of products around one idea with more features? Personal, Professional, Enterprise versions of software is a fairly standardized way of adding additional features but orienting them towards different markets.

— Can I build a family of products that are related to each other but different from each other in functionality? Word, Powerpoint, Visio, Excel are all examples of slightly related products but providing different kinds of functionality.

Many times, we think that innovation is coming up with something completely new,. Successful innovations have all fixed or fine-tuned something useful but had some problems that were preventing widespread adoption.

Sometimes it is as simple as figuring out what these are and fixing them. And also thinking about related things so that you are thinking about a “family of products” rather than a single “one hit wonder”.

Wikipedia provides a clear definition of Innovation:

Innovation is the development of new customer value through solutions that meet new needs, unarticulated needs, or old customer and market needs in new ways. This is accomplished through different or more effective products, processes, services,technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention in that innovation refers to the use of a better and, as a result, novel idea or method, whereas invention refers more directly to the creation of the idea or method itself. Innovation differs from improvement in that innovation refers to the notion of doing something different (Lat. innovare: “to change”) rather than doing the same thing better.