Service maximization through an integrated platform must be the focus of technology for governments, says Vishwanath Alluri, the Founder and Executive Chairman of IMImobile, in an interview with the Elets News Network (ENN). Excerpts:
Anew wave of social media, Cloud and mobile technology is sweeping the world. How should governments use these new technologies to engage with their citizens?
The future rests with the Cloud-mobile-social media. Those will have a seismic effect on technology usage for governance, too. The content created is being accessed on mobile devices and the governments are being forced to have their presence on social media, as the popularity of such sites is immense. Adoption of the new-wave technologies enables easier, faster and deeper engagement with the citizens and enhances productivity of public service personnel.
With over 100 million social network users and over 900 million mobile subscribers in India, the governments today have no option but to harness the ubiquity of mobile to engage with its citizens and deliver services to them. They must deliver various services in domains like Government to Citizen, Government to Government and Citizen to Government across various channels such as SMS, Voice, Mobile Web, USSD, IVR and Mobile Apps.
Who should the government partner with to benefit from the new technologies and why?
The governments and their departments should partner with the technology companies born in the new age and designed for the future. IT service companies that were born and flourished in the previous technology era, who have traditionally been vendors of IT to governments, are not the right vendors. They try to force-fit the requirements of the new age into irrelevant legacy technology, and waste customers time and money as their delivery models are not fit for today. They are normally tuned to provide CAPEX-intensive model for hardware and licensing model for software, which is wasteful.
Service maximization through integrated platform, CAPEX elimination and the capability technologies must be key capabilities of a technology partner. Moreover, it is advisable to choose a vendor whose core model is built on SoCloMo – thus ensuring full commitment and understanding. Customers should select a vendor that offers comprehensive mobility solutions, as solutions provided in bits and pieces can result in unnecessary duplication, complications and loss of focus.
IMImobile, born in the new technology era, has grown its technology platform organically and offers services through Cloud that are also integrated with social media platforms.
The need of the hour is a self-service model for clients to define, configure and deploy their services with minimum effort. IMImobile’s unique platform approach eliminates CAPEX, and harnesses the power of Cloud to commercialize its own unified mobile platform through a Cloud-based services model hosted and managed by it.
Could you tell us about a few key Cloud-based mobility deployments that IMImobile has implemented in India and across the globe? What was special about these projects?
We have a number of engagements with government departments, PSUs and other bodies to whom IMImobile offers SoCloMo solutions that really are unique. We have IMImobile OPENHOUSE, a secure Cloud-based mobile engagement platform that makes it simple to set up multi-channel customer engagement services and integrate with the existing IT systems of the government departments.
There are several instances where we have done breakthrough work in Cloud-based mobility deployments. For one of India’s largest state governments, IMImobile has enabled a unified Mobile Service Delivery platform (MSDP) where all departments are able to deliver services through a common platform.
This platform can deliver various G2C, G2G and C2G services across various channels like SMS, Voice, Mobile, Web, USSD, IVR and Mobile Apps. Key services offered include women and child-related services such as Anganwadi services, malnourished child monitoring services, ration-card verification, revenue department services, etc. The platform is India’s first unified citizen services delivery platform for over 50 million mobile subscribers in the state and can conduct a record over 3,00,000 lakh citizen interactions across different channels per day. These are significant and hitherto unprecedented numbers that no vendor in India can hope to match at this time.
An integrated platform benefits not only the common man but also the overall system by synchronizing processes of different departments. It can eliminate the silo approach and help in easily creating and managing services for citizens as well as cross-departmental service functions. This is the first time in India where a government has taken a holistic approach for leveraging mobile technology for delivering citizen services of all departments on a single platform and we are proud to be a part of it.